The Great Flood was a global event

[homeschoolmom]

[quote name='hot stuff' date='Mar 22 2006, 10:37 AM']I'd like to publically apologize to Hsmom for misinterpreting her ranch dressing recipe.

I was wrong to do so and I humbly ask her forgiveness in this public forum
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I accpet your apology. Thanks for being man enough to humble yourself to make it. You rock.

[homeschoolmom]

[quote name='Azriel' date='Mar 22 2006, 10:37 AM'].... a 'god' even ....

sorry, couldn't resist. :
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I accept your apology.

[Brother Adam]

I just logged on to make a humble public apology. Seriously, I did. Until hot stuff pulled that stunt. Never mind now. I was even willing to ignore the brain damage remark...

Edited March 22, 2006 by Brother Adam

[Jaime]

Well you asked to be provoked.


Sheesh

[homeschoolmom]

[quote name='Brother Adam' date='Mar 22 2006, 10:42 AM']I just logged on to make a humble public apology. Seriously, I did. Until hot stuff pulled that stunt. Never mind now. I was even willing to [b]ignore the brain damage remark...[/b][right][snapback]917865[/snapback][/right]
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[Brother Adam]

[quote name='homeschoolmom' date='Mar 22 2006, 10:51 AM']
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[quote]THAT is a dis-service to your brain and and our God.[/quote]

Sorry, the "dis-service to your brain and our God" remark.

[homeschoolmom]

Well, if you're willing to overlook that, I'm willing to overlook the post where you accused me of playing God...

[Brother Adam]

[quote name='peach_cube' date='Mar 22 2006, 05:16 AM']Certain aspects of Science develop and become refined, however some are quite certain.  How rocks form is not in question, whereas more complicated processes are still very much in doubt.  For example, Corona on Venus, some volcanic features on Io, convection mechanics in the upper and lower mantle.  An intellectually honest scientist has no qualms admitting that there is unknown.  That does not make the known false.
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I realize that you are a geologist, and thanks for your input so far, but do you know of any examples where macro-evolution has been demonstrated, where one species becomes a brand new species through natural means (not scientists messing with dna)?

[Brother Adam]

[quote name='cmotherofpirl' date='Mar 22 2006, 09:40 AM']Yep.
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That's fine then. I don't have a copy of the PM I sent you, though wish I saved it now.

I'm sorry, I was way too harsh. Actually no, it was worse than harsh. I was rude, and probably came off as a jerk. While I really don't personally see the same connections everyone is making, I'll take everyones word for it, because that is what you all saw. It isn't necessary for me to work out where I went wrong in my own mind, I'll have faith that all of you are right and I have erred.

[i]I am sorry, and I ask for forgiveness.[/i]

Edited March 22, 2006 by Brother Adam

[Jaime]

*passes adam some popcorn*

[cmotherofpirl]

TACO PARTY!!!

You really do need to see where we are coming from. One can accept science and Catholicism because they both have the same source - GOD. Genesis tells us why we are here, science tells us how. It is not either-or situation it is both.

Apology Accepted :


Want some popcorn??

[homeschoolmom]

The ranch is delicious...

[Brother Adam]

I want to be left alone. Thank you.

The topic of the thread is on the flood as it is recorded in Genesis and whether or not it was a myth or not.

[cmotherofpirl]

II. HISTORICITY OF THE BIBLICAL DELUGE ACCOUNT
It has been contended that the Flood story of the Bible and the Flood legends of other peoples, looked at from a merely historical point of view, stand on a similar footing, the Biblical account being a mere late variant of one of them. And on inquiring into their origin, we find that four theories have been advanced:

1]The Flood story is a mere product of fancy. This theory contradicts the analogy of similar legends among all peoples.

2]The Deluge story is by others considered as a nature-myth, representing the phenomena of winter, which in Babylonia especially is the time of rain. This nature-myth again is by some writers believed to have grown out of an archaic ether-myth, according to which the sun was imagined as a man voyaging on a boat in the heavenly ocean. The fact that the sea was to be found on the earth, not in heaven, and the damage wrought by the incessant winter-rain and the inundation of great rivers, transferred the myth from heaven to earth, changing the ether-myth into a nature-myth. But this theory, too, neglects the numerous Flood stories existing among many nations, which do not lend themselves to a similar explanation.

3]Connected with the preceding theory is the explanation which makes the Deluge story a cosmogonic fable. It has been seen that the hero rescued in the ship must have been the sun-god (cf. the ether-myth). Thus the Deluge becomes ultimately a variant of the Babylonian creation-myth. It is for this reason that the mythological text published by Peiser calls the time of the Deluge "the year of the great serpent". For this "great serpent" is the personified ocean which on old Babylonian maps encircles Babylonia, just as leviathan is the world-encircling ocean personified as a serpent; it is the same monster which is a central figure in the Creation story. We need not add that this theory too leaves the great bulk of the existing Flood traditions unexplained.

4]It has been inferred from the improbability of the preceding theories, that the Flood story must be a poetical or legendary presentation of some natural occurrence. Furthermore, it is maintained that the immediate basis of the legend is a local disturbance. It may have been a great inundation caused by an overflow of the Tigris and Euphrates, or the incursion of a tidal wave resulting from an earthquake south of the mouth of the two rivers. But however terrible the ruin wrought by such inundations may be, this theory does not account for the universality of the Flood tradition, unless we suppose that the ruin affected the ancestors of all human races.

Thus far we have considered the Biblical Flood story from a merely historical point of view. But the student who believes in the inspiration of the Sacred Scriptures and admits the value of tradition in their exegesis can hardly rest satisfied with the results thus far obtained. It will not even be enough to grant that the ancient Flood legend became the vehicle of religious and spiritual truth by means of a divinely guided religious feeling and insight of the inspired writer. The Deluge is referred to in several passages of Scripture as a historical fact; the writings of the Fathers consider the event in the same light, and this view of the subject is confirmed by the numerous variants under which the Flood tradition lives in the most distant nations of the earth.

(a) The following are some of the New Testament passages which imply that the Deluge was a real historical event: "And as in the days of Noe, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, even till that day in which Noe entered into the ark, and they knew not. till the flood came, and took them all away; so also shall the coming of the Son of man be" (Matthew 24:37-39). In these words Christ regards the Flood with its circumstances as being not less real than the last days will be of which He speaks in the passage. The same view concerning the Flood, Christ implies in Luke, xvii, 26-27. In the Epistle to the Hebrews (xi, 7) the inspired writer is not less clear about the historicity of the Flood: "By faith, Noe having received an answer concerning those things which as yet were not seen, moved with fear, framed the ark for the saving of his house, by the which he condemned the world; and was instituted heir of the justice which is by faith." St. Peter (1 Peter 3:20) too refers to the ark and the Flood as historical facts: "When they waited for the patience of God in the days of Noe, when the ark was a building: wherein a few, that is, eight souls, were saved by water". He returns to the same teaching in II Peter, ii, 5. We might appeal to Is., liv, 9; Nah., i, 8; Ezech., xiv, 14; Ecclus., xliv, 18 sq.; Ps. xxviii, 10; xxxi, 6; but what has been said sufficiently shows that the Bible urges the historicity of the Deluge story.

(b) As to the view of Christian tradition, it suffices to appeal here to the words of Father Zorell who maintains that the Bible story concerning the Flood has never been explained or understood in any but a truly historical sense by any Catholic writer (cf. Hagen, Lexicon Biblicum). It would be useless labour and would exceed the scope of the present article to enumerate the long list of Fathers and Scholastic theologians who have touched upon the question. The few stray discordant voices belonging to the last fifteen or twenty years are simply drowned in this unanimous chorus of Christian tradition.

© The historicity of the Biblical Flood account is confirmed by the tradition existing in all places and at all times as to the occurrence of a similar catastrophe. F. von Schwarz (Sintfluth und Völkerwanderungen, pp. 8-18) enumerates sixty-three such Flood stories which are in his opinion independent of the Biblical account. R. Andree (Die Flutsagen ethnographisch betrachtet) discusses eighty-eight different Flood stories, and considers sixty-two of them as independent of the Chaldee and Hebrew tradition. Moreover, these stories extend through all the races of the earth excepting the African; these are excepted, not because it is certain that they do not possess any Flood traditions, but because their traditions have not as yet been sufficiently investigated. Lenormant pronounces the Flood story as the most universal tradition in the history of primitive man, and Franz Delitzsch was of opinion that we might as well consider the history of Alexander the Great a myth, as to call the Flood tradition a fable. It would, indeed, be a greater miracle than that of the Deluge itself, if the various and different conditions surrounding the several nations of the earth had produced among them a tradition substantially identical. Opposite causes would have produced the same effect.

III. UNIVERSALITY OF THE DELUGE
The Biblical account ascribes some kind of a universality to the Flood. But it may have been geographically universal, or it may have been only anthropologically universal. In other words, the Flood may have covered the whole earth, or it may have destroyed all men, covering only a certain part of the earth. Till about the seventeenth century, it was generally believed that the Deluge had been geographically universal, and this opinion is defended even in our days by some conservative scholars (cf. Kaulen in Kirchenlexikon). But two hundred years of theological and scientific study devoted to the question have thrown so much light on it that we may now defend the following conclusions:

(1) The geographical universality of the Deluge may be safely abandoned.

Neither Sacred Scripture nor universal ecclesiastical tradition, nor again scientific considerations, render it advisable to adhere to the opinion that the Flood covered the whole surface of the earth.

(a) The words of the original text, rendered "earth" in our version, signify "land" as well as "earth"; in fact, "land" appears to have been their primary meaning, and this meaning fits in admirably with Gen., iv, v, and Gen., x; why not adhere to this meaning also in Gen., vi-ix, or the Flood story. Why not read, the waters "filled all on the face of the land", "all flesh was destroyed that moved in the land", "all things wherein there is the breath of life in the land died", "all the high mountains under the whole heaven (corresponding to the land) were covered"? The primary meaning of the inspired text urges therefore a universality of the flood covering the whole land or region in which Noe lived, but not the whole earth.

(b) As to the cogency of the proof from tradition for the geographical universality of the Flood, it must be remembered that very few of the Fathers touched upon this question ex professo. Among those who do so there are some who restrict the Deluge to certain parts of the earth's surface without incurring the blame of offending against tradition.

The earthly paradise, e.g., was exempted by many, irrespective of its location on the top of a high mountain or elsewhere;
the same must be said of the place in which Mathusala must have lived during the Flood according to the Septuagint reading;
St. Augustine knows of writers who exempted the mountain Olympus from the Flood, though he himself does not agree with them;
Pseudo-Justin hesitatingly rejects the opinion of those who restrict the Flood to the parts of the earth actually inhabited by men;
Cajetan revived the opinion that the Flood did not cover Olympus and other high mountains, believing that Genesis spoke only of the mountains under the aerial heaven;
Tostatus sees a figure of speech in the expression of the Bible which implies the universality of the Flood; at any rate, he exempts the earthly Paradise from the Deluge, since Henoch had to be saved.
If the Fathers had considered the universality of the Flood as part of the body of ecclesiastical tradition, or of the deposit of faith, they would have defended it more vigorously. It is true that the Congregation of the Index condemned Vossius's treatise "De Septuaginta Interpretibus" in which he defended, among other doctrines, the view that the Flood covered only the inhabited part of the earth; but theologians of great weight maintained that the work was condemned on account of its Protestant author, and not on account of its doctrine.
© There are also certain scientific considerations which oppose the view that the Flood was geographically universal. Not that science opposes any difficulty insuperable to the power of God; but it draws attention to a number of most extraordinary, if not miraculous phenomena involved in the admission of a geographically universal Deluge.

First, no such geological traces can be found as ought to have been left by a universal Deluge; for the catastrophe connected with the beginning of the ice-age, or the geological deluge, must not be connected with the Biblical.
Secondly, the amount of water required by a universal Deluge, as described in the Bible, cannot be accounted for by the data furnished in the Biblical account. If the surface of the earth, in round numbers, amounts to 510,000,000 square kilometres, and if the elevation of the highest mountains reaches about 9000 metres, the water required by the Biblical Flood, if it be universal, amounts to about 4,600,000,000 cubic kilometres. Now, a forty days' rain, ten times more copious than the most violent rainfall known to us, will raise the level of the sea only about 800 metres; since the height to be attained is about 9000 metres, there is still a gap to be filled by unknown sources amounting to a height of more than 8000 metres, in order to raise the water to the level of the greatest mountains.
Thirdly, if the Biblical Deluge was geographically universal, the sea water and the fresh water would mix to such an extent that neither the marine animals nor the fresh-water animals could have lived in the mixture without a miracle.
Fourthly, there are serious difficulties connected with the animals in the ark, if the Flood was geographically universal: How were they brought to Noe from the remote regions of the earth in which they lived? How could eight persons take care of such an array of beasts? Where did they obtain the food necessary for all the animals? How could the arctic animals live with those of the torrid zone for a whole year and under the same roof?
No Catholic commentator will repudiate an explanation merely for fear of having to admit a miracle; but no Catholic has a right to admit Biblical miracles which are not well attested either by Scripture or tradition. What is more, there are traces in the Biblical Flood story which favour a limited extent of the catastrophe: Noe could have known the geographical universality of the Deluge only by revelation; still the Biblical account appears to have been written by an eye-witness. If the Flood had been universal, the water would have had to fall from the height of the mountains in India to the level of those in Armenia on which the ark rested, i.e. about 11,500 feet, within the space of a few days. The fact that the dove is said to have found "the waters . . . upon the whole earth", and that Noe "saw that the face of the earth was dried", leaves the impression that the inspired writer uses the word "earth" in the restricted sense of "land". Attention has been drawn also to the "bough of an olive tree, with green leaves" carried by the dove in her mouth on her second return to the ark.
(2) The Deluge must have been anthropologically universal, i.e. it must have destroyed the whole human race.

After limiting the extent of the Flood to a part of the earth, we naturally ask whether any men lived outside the region covered by its waters. It has been maintained that not all men can have perished in the Flood for the following reasons: Tribes which certainly sprang from Noe were preceded in their earliest settlements by other tribes whose origin is unknown to us: the Dravidic tribes preceded the Aryans in India; the proto-Medians preceded the Medians; the Akkadians preceded the Cushites and Semites in Chaldea; the Chanaanites were preceded in Palestine by other races. Besides, the oldest Egyptian monuments present the Negro race just as we find it to-day, so that even at that remote age, it was wholly different from the Caucasian race. Again, the languages of the races springing from Noe are said to be in a state of development different from that in which we find the languages of the peoples of unknown origin. Finally, the Biblical account of the Flood is said to admit a restriction of its anthropological universality as readily as a limitation of its geographical completeness; for if "land" be substituted in our translation for earth, the Book of Genesis speaks only of the men inhabiting a certain district, and not of the men of the whole earth, as being the victims of the waters. Considerations like these have induced several Catholic writers to regard as quite tenable the opinion that the Deluge did not destroy all men outside the ark.

But if the reason advanced for limiting the Flood to a certain part of the human race be duly examined, they are found to be more specious than true. The above scientific arguments do not favour a partial destruction of the human race absolutely, but only in so far as the uninterrupted existence of the various races in question gives them more time for the racial development and the historical data that have to be harmonized with the text of Genesis. Those who urge these arguments grant, therefore, implicitly that the allowance of a proper length of time will explain the facts on which their arguments are based. As there is nothing in the teaching of the Bible preventing us from assigning the Flood to a much earlier date than has usually been done, the difficulties urged on the part of science against the anthropological universality of the Flood may be easily evaded. Nor can the distribution of the nations as described in the tenth chapter of Genesis be appealed to, seeing that this section does not enumerate all races of the earth, but confines itself probably to the Caucasian.

Science, therefore, may demand an early date for the Deluge, but it does not necessitate a limitation of the Flood to certain parts of the human race. The question, whether all men perished in the Deluge, must be decided by the teaching of the Bible, and of its authoritative interpreter. As to the teachings of the Bible, the passage which deals ex professo with the Flood (Genesis 6-9), if taken by itself, may be interpreted of a partial destruction of man; it insists on the fact that all inhabitants of the "land", not of the "earth", died in the waters of the Deluge, and it does not explicitly tell us whether all men lived in the "land". It may also be granted, that of the passages which refer incidentally to the flood, Wis., x, 4; xiv, 6; Ecclus., xliv, 17 sqq., and Matt., xxiv, 37 sqq., may be explained, more or less satisfactorily, of a partial destruction of the human race by the inundation of the Deluge; but no one can deny that the prima facie meaning of I Peter, iii, 20 sq., II Peter, ii, 4-9, and II Peter, iii, 5 sqq., refers to the death of all men not contained in the ark. The explanations of these passages, offered by the opponents of the anthropological universality of the Deluge, are hardly sufficient to remove all reasonable doubt. We turn, therefore, to authority in order to arrive at a final settlement of the question. Here we are confronted, in brief, with the following facts: Up to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the belief in the anthropological universality of the Deluge was general. Moreover, the Fathers regarded the ark and the Flood as types of baptism and of the Church; this view they entertained not as a private opinion, but as a development of the doctrine contained in I Peter, iii, 20 sq. Hence, the typical character of both ark and Flood belongs to the "matters of faith and morals" in which the Tridentine and the Vatican Councils oblige all Catholics to follow the interpretation of the Church.

newadvent.org

[cmotherofpirl]

The Genesis Controversy


Has it been duly noted that Darwin’s theory of evolution is dying? Not at the hands of fundamentalists; it is being killed off by the scientific community itself. The slow acknowledgment that the theory has died may prove to be an intellectual watershed more important than the ongoing demolition of Marx and Freud. No book has so profoundly affected the way modern man looks at himself than The Origin of the Species, first published in l859. The notion that man is the result of a blind, materialist process which did not have him in mind is at the core of modern secularist thinking. If Darwin’s theory goes, we are in for what philosophers call a ’paradigm shift,’ a moving of tectonic plates, and a lot of intellectuals will be running for cover.


RELUCTANT OR UNTHINKING ACCEPTANCE
But it may be too early for the obituaries. Many scientists would rather cling to Darwin’s theory, in whatever baroque form, than face the implications of its demise. Darwin’s scientific detractors, moreover, are generally reticent about making their objections public for fear of being labelled ‘creationists.’ So the newspaper-reading public has not been let in on what the British scientific journal “Nature“ recently called ’the sharp dissent and frequently acrimonious debate’ over evolutionary theory, while the armies of biology teachers, science writers, and public television wildlife hosts carry on as though there were no problem with Darwin at all.

So many myths have been spun around the figure of Darwin and the history of his theory that untangling them can be difficult. History as they say, is written by the victors, and most encyclopedias, textbooks, and popular histories spoon-feed the prevailing Darwinian orthodoxy. So before examining the theory of evolution, it is worth looking at Darwin himself and at how his ideas developed.


NATURAL SELECTION
Charles Darwin (1809-82) was a dull, reticent Englishman whose large fortune allowed him to pursue a passion for studying nature. Although he claimed his work had no objectives other than scientific, it is clear from his private journals that his motives were no less metaphysical than those of the clergy who attacked him. Darwin was a materialist. He dispensed with a mild Protestant faith early in life and became increasingly hostile toward religion as he grew older. One historian has described Darwin as a ’good Christian,’ but this hardly fits the man who wrote in his journal in 1873:

I have lately read Morley’s Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force and vigor of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect; real good seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks.

Contrary to popular myth,Darwin did not hit upon his idea of natural selection while observing the animal life on the Galapagos Islands in 1835 during the voyage of the Beagle. The varieties of finches and other species he saw there merely gave him the idea that species might change over the course of time. This idea had been around since the ancient Greeks. The Eureka! moment came later when Darwin read Malthus’ famous (and discredited) Essay on Population, which held that population tends to multiply faster than food supply and that only the fittest will survive. Darwin took this ’struggle for existence’ among humans and applied it to plants and animals.


SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
Malthus had wished to show that political economy was subject to the same sort of mechanical laws that Newton had demonstrated in physics. Darwin had the same motive in biology to describe the origin of life as the result of mechanical laws rather than the wilful act of a Creator. Like Malthus, Darwin came up with a formula whose simplicity and seemingly taut logic gave it immense popular appeal: ’natural selection’ - to which he later appended Herbert Spencer’s phrase, ’survival of the fittest.’

Darwin maintained that organisms produce off-spring which vary slightly from their parents and that ’natural selection’ will favor the survival of those individuals whose peculiarities (sharper teeth, more prehensile claws) render them best adapted to their environment. Darwinian evolution is a two-stage process: random variation as to raw materials, natural selection as directing force.


MICRO-EVOLUTION VS. MACRO-EVOLUTION
Once he struck on his theory, he spent a great deal of time observing breeders at work near his Kent home. The opening section of The Origin of the Species is mainly about pigeons, which often surprises readers. He noticed that through selective breeding pigeons could be made to develop certain desired characteristics such as color and wing-span. He extrapolated from this observation the notion that over many millennia species could change - with natural selection acting as the ‘breeder’ - into entirely new ones.

But a critical distinction has to be made here. What Darwin saw in the breeding pens is micro-evolution. Micro-evolution is the name biologists give to the small changes that occur within a species over time. Such evolution is common. People, for example, are generally taller today than they were a hundred years ago. The various finches Darwin saw on the Galapagos islands are another example of ‘micro’ changes. Darwin went further, however. He said that over time, these micro-evolutionary shifts could gradually add up to macro-evolution, a change from one species into another, and that all plants and animals have descended from ancestors whose forms were entirely different from those we see today. Here we run into problems.


FOSSIL RECORD DOES NOT SUPPORT DARWIN
First, the fossil evidence. If Darwin’s theory is correct, the fossil record should show innumerable slight gradations between earlier species and later ones. Darwin was aware, however, that the fossil record of his day showed nothing of the sort. There were enormous discontinuities between forms. He accordingly entitled his chapter on the subject, On the Imperfection of the Geological Record. He hoped that future digging would fill in the gaps, which he admitted to be the ’gravest’ objection to his theory. Plenty of fossils have been dug up since, and they do not support gradual evolution. Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard biologist, calls this the great ’trade secret’ of modern paleontology.

The fossil record shows exactly what it showed in Darwin’s day - that species appear suddenly in a fully developed state and change little or not at all before disappearing (99 out of 100 species are extinct.) About 600 million years ago there was a sudden explosion of highly organized life-forms such as molluscs and jellyfish. Not a single ancestral multicellular fossil is to be found in earlier rocks. Niles Eldredge, head of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, writes that the theory of gradual evolution ‘is out of phase’ with the fossil record:

“We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports that interpretation, all the while really knowing that it does not.”


NO TRACE OF TRANSITIONAL FORMS
Admits Gould: “Phyletic gradualism (i.e., gradual evolution)...was never seen in the rocks.”

What about those pictures in museums and textbooks, those charts showing how large horses gradually evolved from smaller ones, and so forth? These are artistic conjectures which are constantly being falsified as new bones are dug up. In effect, paleontologists find a fossil of an extinct species and make up a scenario connecting it with a later or earlier animal. But they never find the series of transitional forms which Darwin’s theory demands.

The famous series of pictures at the American Museum of Natural History showing the ‘evolution’ of horses, the diminutive Eohippus slowly changing into modern Equus, has become some thing of a joke even among Darwinists. Eohippus remained Eohippus; it was followed by numerous species of horses, some smaller. The chart is nonetheless widely reprinted in textbooks and passed off as fact.

John Bonner, a science professor at Princeton, says that textbook discussions of ancestral descent are generally ‘a festering mass of unsupported assertions.’ The ‘ancestry’ of man changes about once a decade as the few bits of hominid fossil are shuffled about.


BREEDING EXPERIMENTS LEND DARWIN NO SUPPORT
Since the fossil record gives no evidence of the gradual transformation of species, the only other place to look is breeding experiments. But here the evidence also goes against Darwin. Breeders can change the color of a pigeon or the size of a cow to some degree, but they can only go so far. In fact, all breeders have the same experience: if they try to go too far in one direction, the animal or plant in question either becomes sterile or reverts back to type.

The most famous breeder of all, Luther Burbank, found no evidence of the unlimited plasticity of species which Darwin’s theory demands and posited a Law of Reversion to Average. The late Richard Goldschmidt, a leading geneticist who taught at Berkeley, spent years observing the mutations of fruit flies and concluded that biologists had to give up Darwin’s idea that an accumulation of micro changes creates new species. If you have a ‘thousand point’ mutation in a fruitfly - a statistical impossibility - it is still a fruitfly.


ADAPTATION TO PRESERVE THE SPECIES
The small changes we do see in species, such as wolves growing a heavier coat of fur to cope with a colder climate, tend to preserve a species rather than change it. As Robert Augros and George Stanciu point out in The New Biology, ‘adaptation’ is simply ecological adjustment; it is not the source of new species. No one, then, has ever seen one species change into another either in the fossil record or in breeding experiments. Darwin himself was unable to come up with a single indisputable case of one animal changing into another via ‘natural selection.’ His case was entirely theoretical; it rested on a chain of suppositions rather than empirical observation; the ‘facts’ that he mustered were either made to fit the theory or were explained away.


A TRUISM THAT THE FITTEST SURVIVE
The theory itself - Natural Selection, or the survival of the fittest - has been dismissed by many critics as an empty tautology rather than a scientific theory. Tom Bethell, writing in Harper’s several years ago, was not the first to point out that the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ is entirely circular. Who survives? The fittest. How do we know that they are the fittest? They survive. Jacques Barzun, an acute critic of Darwin, pointed out that this is like the character in Moliere who explains that opium causes sleep because of its ‘dormitive powers.’

It is an obvious truism that the fittest survive. The question is whether the ‘struggle for existence’ is the mechanism by which one species changes into another. C.H. Waddington, one of the major biologists of the twentieth century, dismissed the idea of natural selection as ‘vacuous,’ saying that it ‘merely amounts to the statement that the individuals which leave most offspring are those which leave most offspring.’ What is needed, as Bethell pointed out, is a criterion of fitness other than ‘survivability.’ Despite much verbal gymnastics, Darwinists have not been able to provide one.


NOT AND OPEN MINDED SCIENTIST
Darwin presented himself in his writing as an open-minded, amiable naturalist sorting his facts and humbly open to objections. This image partly accounts for the enormous intellectual authority he exerted in Victorian England. He kept telling his readers, in effect, that he could be trusted, that he was only going by the facts: ‘I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.’

But in reality he argued like a man in the grips of a dogma. He did not hesitate to get rid of embarrassing facts with ad hoc explanations - or no explanations at all. His method, as Gertrude Himmelfarb describes it, ‘was neither observing nor the more prosaic mode of scientific reasoning, but a peculiarly imaginative, inventive mode of argument...possibilities were promoted into probabilities, and probabilities into certainties.’


EXAMINING THE WHALE
Confronting the whale, for example, which appears out of nowhere in the fossil record and which he, like all evolutionists since maintained to be descended from land animals. Darwin was unable to explain how, for example, the specialized apparatus which allows the mother whale to suckle her young underwater - which includes a special cap around the nipple into which the snout of the young fits very tightly to prevent it from taking in sea water - slowly evolved on land. All modifications would have had to take place before the first whale could successfully suckle her young underwater. Why would ‘natural selection’ bring about such changes in a land animal?

Here’s how Darwin handles the whale (which presents many other problems as well) in the first edition of Origin I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.’


THE EVOLVING EYE
Darwin, in effect, proposed natural selection as a theory in need of proof and then used it as an a priori explanation for the origin of complex organisms. This circularity is for the most part camouflaged, although sometimes Darwin slips into solutions like: ‘In living bodies variation will cause the slight alterations.’ To this day, no evolutionist has explained how an organ as complex as the eye, all of whose components - retina, iris, cornea, etc. - must be fully formed and coordinated for it to work, could have suddenly appeared, by biological freak and in a form developed enough to prove its ‘survival value,’ on a slippery creature feeling its way around in the muck. As one biologist put it: ‘Since the eye must be either perfect, or perfectly useless, how could it have evolved by small, successive, Darwinian steps?’


ALL IS NOT CHANGE OR STRUGGLE
This problem of accounting for intermediate stages, each of which, according to Darwin, must be useful to the organism, has been a major thorn in the side of evolutionists. As Gould puts it; ‘What good is half a jaw or half a wing?’ In 1940, Goldschmidt published a list of 17 items - including hair, feathers, teeth, eyes, whalebone, and the poison fangs of a snake - and challenged anybody to explain how they evolved on a step-by-step basis. Goldschmidt was subjected to a savage campaign of vilification, but no explanation has ever been furnished. It should be recalled that Darwin himself admitted that his theory would break down if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications.’

There are other major problems with classical Darwinian theory. Among them are the fact that scientists see very little ‘struggle for survival’ in nature (many species tend to cooperate and occupy ecological niches which do not compete); the fact that fossils show a few species in many groups (or phyla) have been replaced over millennia by many species in a few groups (which is the reverse of Darwin’s model); and that several species like the lungfish have not changed at all in over 300 million years despite important shifts in their environment (which flatly contradicts the constant fine tuning Darwin attributed to ‘natural selection’).


THEORY BECOMES DOGMA
Darwin himself was increasingly plagued by doubts after the first edition of the Origin. In subsequent editions, he kept backing off from natural selection as the explanation for all natural phenomena. Loren Eiseley writes in Darwin’s Century that a ‘close examination of the last edition of the Origin reveals that in attempting on scattered pages to meet the objections being launched against his theory the much-labored upon volume had become contradictory...The last repairs to the Origin reveal...how very shaky Darwin’s theoretical structure had become.’ Darwin’s unproven theory nonetheless had become dogma in the public mind.


SCIENTISTS OPPOSE DARWIN
Yet, there was sharp scientific opposition from the start. As Swedish biologist Soren Lovtrup points out, most of Darwin’s early opponents, even when they had religious motives, “argued on a completely scientific basis.” In fact, in the decades following Darwin’s death in 1882, his theory came increasingly under a cloud.

Lovtrup writes: “During the first third of our century, biologists did not believe in Darwinism.” Mans Driesch in Germany, Lucien Cuenot in France, Douglas Dewar in England, Vernon Kellogg and T.H. Morgan in America, biologists and geneticists with international reputations, all rejected Darwin’s theory during this period. Cuenot wrote that: “we must wholly abandon the Darwinian hypothesis,” while the Dictionnaire Enclopedique des Sciences dismissed Darwin’s theory as “a fiction, a poetical accumulation of probabilities without proof, and of attractive explanations without demonstrations.”

The great irony is that the Scopes trial in 1925, which the American popular imagination still regards as putting to rest the whole case against Darwin, took place against this background of general skepticism. The scientific issues were never properly discussed at the trial and Clarence Darrow was able to ridicule William Jennings Bryan’s fundamentalist beliefs. A properly coached cross-examination could have made Darrow seem equally ridiculous defending Darwin. To this day, an aesthetic aversion toward Bible-thumping fundamentalists in the United States and England accounts for the fact that Darwinism remains a somewhat parochial theory. It is rejected, for example, by a large majority of French biologists, including the most eminent, Pierre P. Grasse, who says Darwin’s theory is “either in conflict with reality or else incapable of solving the major problems.” And French philosopher Etienne Gilson was amazed by “the American tendency to take evolutionary Darwinism for a phenomenon of planetary significance.”


RANDOM VARIATIONS: THE DRIVING FORCE OF EVOLUTION
Because of obvious flaws in Darwin’s original theory, the so called ‘synthetic theory’ (sometimes called ‘neo-Darwinism’) emerged around 1930. This incorporated genetics, molecular biology and mathematical models. But the synthetic theory remained completely Darwinian in its identification of random variations preserved by natural selection as the driving force of evolution. Contradictory facts were explained away with smoothing phrases like ‘genetic drift’ or with mathematical models intelligible only to a small minority of biologists.

But as Waddington complained: “the whole real guts of evolution - which is how do you come to have horses and tigers and things - is outside mathematical theory; you are still left with the vacuous explanation of natural selection.”

Genetics and molecular biology turned out to be no help, either. In Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler & Adler, 1986), molecular biologist Michael Denton demolishes the idea that natural selection could have produced at random the smallest elements of life - the functional protein or gene. And “to get a cell by chance would require at least one hundred functional proteins to appear simultaneously in one place,” which is outside the realm of probability. A cell is so complex, writes Denton, that it excels “anything produced by the intelligence of man.” It is also irreducible; a simpler ‘cell’ would not work. So how, asks Denton, could cells have randomly ‘evolved’? It would be like a volcano spewing out a factory.


VIEWS OF DARWINISM TODAY
In 1980, Stephen Jay Gould echoed the private sentiments of many scientists when he declared:

‘The synthetic theory...is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.’ Since the synthetic theory originally arose in response to the collapse of classical Darwinism, where does that leave scientists today? There are roughly three camps in America:

Those who still cling to orthodox Darwinism on the grounds that no one has come up with a better explanation for the origin of species: Those (like Gould and Eldredge) who have concocted baroque refinements of the original theory, such as ‘punctuated equilibria,’ in order to shelter it from empirical falsification; and Those, including a well-known group of ‘cladists,’ who reject the theory altogether.

The tenacity of Darwin’s theory among scientists and educators can only be explained by its crude materialism. The biologist Julian Huxley, who was a kind of roving statesman for Darwinism in the 1940s and 50s claimed that Darwin’s real achievement was to remove the idea of a Creator from intelligent discourse. Huxley’s famous grandfather, T.H. Huxley, was more explicit; he claimed (wrongly, it turned out) that the great merit of evolutionary theory was its “complete and irreconcilable antagonism to that vigorous and consistent enemy of the highest intellectual, moral, and social life of mankind - the Catholic Church.”


FAITH IN EVOLUTION
But Darwinism itself quickly became a kind of religion - a “metaphysical research program” in the dismissive phrase of Karl Popper. In their determination to rid nature at any cost of the principle of design, Darwin’s disciples still show every sign of being under the spell of a dogma, one which explains all phenomena by a single unproveable cause, namely, natural selection. There is so much circumstantial evidence against natural selection as the cause of changes other than those within a given genus that belief in it requires a leap of faith - or, shall we say, ulterior motives. As biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy put it:

That a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable, and so far from criteria otherwise applied to hard science, has become a dogma, can only be explained on sociological grounds.

To give up natural selection would violate the ‘teleological taboo’ of modern scientific thinking. As Augros and Stanciu have said:

“If evolution is not the product of random mutations and survival of the fittest, then the production of new species is not a matter of chance.”

In other words, it’s natural selection or a Creator. There is no middle ground. This is why prominent Darwinists like G.G. Simpson and Stephen Jay Gould, who are not secretive about their hostility to religion, cling so vehemently to natural selection. To do otherwise would be to admit the probability that there is design in nature - and hence a Designer.


PARADIGM SHIFT
The last line of defense of Darwinism is that nobody has come up with a better scientific explanation for the appearance of new species. And it is probably true that Darwinism will not entirely disappear until there is an alternate theory. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn writes that: “the decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another.” History is full of examples (including the Galileo affair) of what Kuhn calls the “priority of the paradigm.” Men will go to any length to defend a theory in the face of falsifying evidence, especially if they are professionals who have invested their careers in the reigning orthodoxy.


BEGINNINGS OF A NEW THEORY
Is a new scientific explanation for the origins of species emerging? I asked one biologist, an anti-Darwinist at the American Museum of Natural History, and he told me that most anti-Darwinists are ‘agnostics’ at this point. “All we know is that species reproduce and that there are different species now than there were 100 million years ago. Everything else is propaganda.” Other scientists, however, claim that research points to the possibility that an internal ‘preprogrammed’ genetic mechanism may cause ‘superfluous’ DNA suddenly to organize itself into new forms. According to this theory, species do not evolve into other species (an assertion supported by the fossil record), but rather harbor the seeds of new species which appear quite suddenly.

Interestingly, this new theory dovetails with the argument St. Augustine set forth in his commentaries on Genesis - that in the beginning God created all living things not immediately, but “potentially in their causes.” God, according to Augustine, placed in his creation seeds (rationes seminales ) which remained “in the hidden recesses of nature.” Augustine understood evolution in the strict etymological sense of the word - an ‘unfolding’ of what is already there.


READING THE BOOK OF GENESIS
But Augustine’s real significance for Catholic thinking on this issue lies not in his scientific conjectures, which were sometimes farfetched, but in his reading of Genesis. In De Genesi ad litteram he asserts that the account of creation could not possibly have been meant to be taken literally. And since Augustine, the Church has never subscribed to a literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis. Catholic thinkers have generally deemed the account of creation as theologically true, if not strictly factual - a poetic compression of the truth, as it were. Darwin’s theory was never the bombshell for Catholics that it was for Protestants adhering to a literal reading of scripture. Darwin himself said that as a young man he had believed the ‘strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible’ and lost his faith when it became clear that ‘science’ disproved Genesis. He was not the last Protestant to do so. In Three Scientists and Their Gods (1988), Robert Wright, interviewing the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. writes:

Like E.O. Wilson, I was brought up a Southern Baptist. Like him, I was bowled over by its power and beauty. Like his religious faith, mine did not survive this encounter.


GUIDANCE FROM THE CHURCH
As is often the case, there is a reasonable Catholic ‘center’ between the poles of scientific and religious fundamentalism. The Catholic response to Darwin was always measured and intelligent. Pope Leo XIII warned scientists not to be ‘overly hasty’ in proclaiming hypotheses as established results, but the Vatican never issued an official condemnation of Darwin’s theory and no scientific work about evolution was ever placed on the Index of forbidden books. In 1909, the Pontifical Biblical Commission, following Augustine and Aquinas, said that one is not bound to seek scientific exactitude in the opening chapters of Genesis. In his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, Pius XII, while pointing out correctly that the theory of evolution ‘has not been fully proved’, permitted “research and discussion...in as far as it requires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent matter.” But whatever the findings of science, Pius affirmed, Catholics must believe that “God intended, from all eternity, to create...and he took those means which he saw to be the most suitable to the purpose.”


SUPPORT FOR CREATION
While allowing what Pope John Paul II, who has a special preoccupation with Genesis, calls a ‘metaphorical’ element in the creation-account, we should keep in mind that the Book of Genesis has held up well under the scrutiny of modern geology and archaeology. Twentieth-century physics, moreover, describes the beginning of the universe in virtually the same cosmological terms as Genesis. Roughly 18 billion years ago, space, time, and matter came out of nothing in a single burst of light exactly calibrated to bring forth carbon based life. The so-called ‘anthropic principle’ that, the universe was made for man to live, is becoming a scientific commonplace. Biologists now tell us that life had its origin from clay templates (ef. Gen. 2. 7), while geneticists assert that we are all descended from one woman (another embarrassment for Darwinists, whose scenarios do not allow for a single progenitor so late in prehistory).

We are obliged to believe that our first parents committed a primal act of disobedience whose effects we still suffer. This belief is, of course, entirely outside the realm of science. But it is worth keeping in mind Cardinal Newman’s remark that the more he thought about humanity, the more clear it was to him that the race was “implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity.”


LET COMMON SENSE PREVAIL
As Catholics, we should look forward to advances in science with enjoyment and confidence. And as nonscientific laymen, we should not hesitate to get involved in the debate over evolution. There is an honorable line of inspired amateurs - Samuel Butler, G.K. Chesterton, Jacques Barzun, Arnold Lunn, Norman Macbeth - whose common sense criticisms of Darwin’s theory have often anticipated those of scientists. Nor should we leave popular science writing to people like Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould or the late J. Brunswick, whose charming expositions, in Stanley Jaki’s phrase, “mask a fierce counter metaphysics.” These writers are masters of what Darwin called the “slow and silent side attacks” against Christianity. But they may be fighting a rearguard action against the dissolution of the nineteenth-century materialist paradigm.



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This article was published in CRISIS magazine. CRISIS is a publication of The Morley Institute, Inc., a non-profit educational foundation. To subscribe to CRISIS magazine call 1-800-852-9962

[Brother Adam]

I'm trying to figure out what your second post has to do with the flood?

[url="http://www.kolbecenter.org/"]http://www.kolbecenter.org/[/url]

[cmotherofpirl]

[quote name='Brother Adam' date='Mar 22 2006, 01:30 PM']I'm trying to figure out what your second post has to do with the flood?

[url="http://www.kolbecenter.org/"]http://www.kolbecenter.org/[/url]
[right][snapback]918076[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]

It discusses the book of Genesis

[Brother Adam]

[quote name='cmotherofpirl' date='Mar 22 2006, 01:31 PM']It discusses the book of Genesis
[right][snapback]918077[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]

What does it have to do with the flood?

[Brother Adam]

[quote]First, no such geological traces can be found as ought to have been left by a universal Deluge; for the catastrophe connected with the beginning of the ice-age, or the geological deluge, must not be connected with the Biblical.
Secondly, the amount of water required by a universal Deluge, as described in the Bible, cannot be accounted for by the data furnished in the Biblical account. If the surface of the earth, in round numbers, amounts to 510,000,000 square kilometres, and if the elevation of the highest mountains reaches about 9000 metres, the water required by the Biblical Flood, if it be universal, amounts to about 4,600,000,000 cubic kilometres. Now, a forty days' rain, ten times more copious than the most violent rainfall known to us, will raise the level of the sea only about 800 metres; since the height to be attained is about 9000 metres, there is still a gap to be filled by unknown sources amounting to a height of more than 8000 metres, in order to raise the water to the level of the greatest mountains.
Thirdly, if the Biblical Deluge was geographically universal, the sea water and the fresh water would mix to such an extent that neither the marine animals nor the fresh-water animals could have lived in the mixture without a miracle.
Fourthly, there are serious difficulties connected with the animals in the ark, if the Flood was geographically universal: How were they brought to Noe from the remote regions of the earth in which they lived? How could eight persons take care of such an array of beasts? Where did they obtain the food necessary for all the animals? How could the arctic animals live with those of the torrid zone for a whole year and under the same roof?
No Catholic commentator will repudiate an explanation merely for fear of having to admit a miracle; but no Catholic has a right to admit Biblical miracles which are not well attested either by Scripture or tradition. What is more, there are traces in the Biblical Flood story which favour a limited extent of the catastrophe: Noe could have known the geographical universality of the Deluge only by revelation; still the Biblical account appears to have been written by an eye-witness. If the Flood had been universal, the water would have had to fall from the height of the mountains in India to the level of those in Armenia on which the ark rested, i.e. about 11,500 feet, within the space of a few days. The fact that the dove is said to have found "the waters . . . upon the whole earth", and that Noe "saw that the face of the earth was dried", leaves the impression that the inspired writer uses the word "earth" in the restricted sense of "land". Attention has been drawn also to the "bough of an olive tree, with green leaves" carried by the dove in her mouth on her second return to the ark.[/quote]

So if something is not explainable by scientific measure, than it is not true?

[Brother Adam]

I'm also curious, which of the following should we look for reasonable scientific answers for, so that we may reject the special intervention of God? I've highlighted the ones that we "[i]know[/i]" really didn't happen per our discussion so far.

[b] 1. Creation of the universe, including plants, animals and humans (Genesis 1-2)
2. The flood (Gen. 7, 8)[/b]
3. Confusion of languages (tongues) at Babel (Gen. 11:1-9)
4. Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19:24)
5. Lot's wife turned into a "pillar of salt" (Gen. 19:26)
6. Birth of Isaac at Gerar (Gen. 21:1)
7. The burning bush not consumed (Ex. 3:3)
8. Aaron's rod changed into a serpent (Ex. 7:10-12)
The ten plagues of Egypt (Ex. 7:20-12:30)
9. waters become blood
10. frogs
11. lice
12. flies
13. murrain
14. boils
15. thunder and hail
16. locusts
17. darkness
18. death of the first-born
19. Red Sea divided; Israel passes through (See: Passage of Red Sea) (Ex. 14:21-31)
20. Waters of Marah sweetened (Ex. 15:23-25)
21. Manna sent daily, except on Sabbath (Ex. 16:14-35)
22. Water from the rock at Rephidim (Ex. 17:5-7)
23. Nadab and Abihu consumed for offering "strange fire" (Lev. 10:1, 2)
24. Some of the people consumed by fire at Taberah (Num. 11:1-3)
25. The earth opens and swallows up Korah and his company. (Num. 16:32-34)
26. Fire at Kadesh (Num. 16:35-45)
27. Plague at Kadesh (Num. 16:46-50)
28. Aaron's rod budding at Kadesh (Num. 17:8)
29. Water from the rock, smitten twice by Moses, Desert of Zin (Num. 20:7-11)
30. The brazen serpent in the Desert of Zin (Num. 21:8, 9)
31. Balaam's ass speaks (Num. 22:21-35)
32. The Jordan divided, so that Israel passed over dryshod near the city of Adam (Josh. 3:14-17)
33. The walls of Jericho fall down (Josh. 6:6-20)
34. The sun and moon stayed. (Josh. 10:12-14)
35. Hailstorm. (Josh. 10:12-14)
36. The strength of Samson (Judg. 14-16)
37. Water from a hollow place "that is in Lehi" (Judg. 15:19)
38. Dagon falls twice before the ark. (1 Sam. 5:1-12)
39. Emerods on the Philistines (1 Sam. 5:1-12)
40. Men of Beth-shemesh smitten for looking into the ark (1 Sam. 6:19)
41. Thunderstorm causes a panic among the Philistines at Eben-ezer (1 Sam. 7:10-12)
42. Thunder and rain in harvest at Gilgal (1 Sam. 12:18)
43. Sound in the mulberry trees at Rephaim (2 Sam. 5:23-25)
44. Uzzah smitten for touching the ark at Perez-uzzah (2 Sam. 6:6, 7)
45. Jeroboam's hand withered. (1 Kings 13:4)
46. Jeroboam's new altar destroyed at Bethel (1 Kings 13:4-6
47. 31. Widow of Zarephath's meal and oil increased (1 Kings 17:14-16)
48. Widow's son raised from the dead (1 Kings 17:17-24)
49. Drought at Elijah's prayers (1 Kings 17, 18)
50. Fire at Elijah's prayers (1 Kings 18:19-39)
51. Rain at Elijah's prayers (1 Kings 18:41-45)
52. Elijah fed by ravens (1 Kings 17, 18)
53. Ahaziah's captains consumed by fire near Samaria (2 Kings 1:10-12)
54. Jordan divided by Elijah and Elisha near Jericho (2 Kings 2:7, 8, 14)
55. Elijah carried up into heaven (2 Kings 2:11)
56. Waters of Jericho healed by Elisha's casting salt into them (2 Kings 2:21, 22)
57. Bears out of the wood destroy forty-two "young men" (2 Kings 2:24)
58. Water provided for Jehoshaphat and the allied army (2 Kings 3:16-20)
59. The widow's oil multiplied (2 Kings 4:2-7)
60. The Shunammite's son given, and raised from the dead at Shunem (2 Kings 4:32-37)
61. The deadly pottage cured with meal at Gilgal (2 Kings 4:38-41)
62. A hundred men fed with twenty loaves at Gilgal (2 Kings 4:42-44)
63. Naaman cured of leprosy, Gehazi afflicted with it (2 Kings 5:10-27)
64. The iron axe-head made to swim, river Jordan (2 Kings 6:5-7)
65. Ben hadad's plans discovered. Hazael's thoughts, etc. (2 Kings 6:12)
66. The Syrian army smitten with blindness at Dothan (2 Kings 6:18)
67. The Syrian army cured of blindness at Samaria (2 Kings 6:20)
68. Elisha's bones revive the dead (2 Kings 13:21)
69. Sennacherib's army destroyed, Jerusalem (2 Kings 19:35)
70. Shadow of sun goes back ten degrees on the sun-dial of Ahaz, Jerusalem (2 Kings 20:9-11)
71. Uzziah struck with leprosy, Jerusalem (2 Chr. 26:16-21)
72. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego delivered from the fiery furnace, Babylon (Dan. 3:10-27)
73. Daniel saved in the lions' den (Dan. 6:16-23)
74. Jonah in the fish's belly. Safely landed (Jonah 2:1-10)
75. Gideon's fleece (Judg. 6:37-40)

Miracles Recorded in the Gospels
76. Cure of two blind men (Matt 9:27-31)
77. Piece of money in the fish's mouth (Matt 17:24-27)
78. The deaf and dumb man (Mark 7:31-37)
79. The blind man of Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26)
80. Jesus passes unseen through the crowd (Luke 4:28-30)
81. The miraculous draught of fishes (Luke 5:4-11)
82. The raising of the widow's son at Nain (Luke 7:11-18)
83. The woman with the spirit of infirmity (Luke 13:11-17)
84. The man with the dropsy (Luke 14:1-6)
85. The ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19)
86. The healing of Malchus (Luke 22:50, 51)
87. Water made wine (John 2:1-11)
88. Cure of nobleman's son, Capernaum (John 4:46-54)
89. Impotent man at Bethsaida cured (John 5:1-9)
90. Man born blind cured (John 9:1-7)
91. Lazarus raised from the dead (John 11:38-44)
92. Draught of fishes (John 21:1-14)
93. Syrophoenician woman's daughter cured (Matt 15:28; Mark 7:24)
94. Four thousand fed (Matt 15:32; Mark 8:1)
95. Fig tree blasted (Matt 21:18; Mark 11:12)
96. Centurion's servant healed (Matt 8:5; Luke 7:1)
97. Blind and dumb demoniac cured (Matt 12:22; Luke 11:14)
98. Demoniac cured in synagogue at Capernaum (Mark 1:23; Luke 4:33)
99. Peter's wife's mother cured (Matt 8:14; Mark 1:30; Luke 4:38)
100. The tempest stilled (Matt 8:23; Mark 4:37; Luke 8:22)
101. Demoniacs of Gadara cured (Matt 8:28; Mark 5:1; Luke 8:26)
102. Swine rush into and drown (Mark 5:1-20)
103. Leper healed (Matt 8:2; Mark 1:40; Luke 5:12)
104. Jairus's daughter raised (Matt 9:23; Mark 5:23; Luke 8:41)
105. Woman's issue of blood cured (Matt 9:20; Mark 5:25; Luke 8:43)
106. Man sick of the palsy cured (Matt 9:2; Mark 2:3; Luke 5:18)
107. Man's withered hand cured (Matt 12:10; Mark 3:1; Luke 6:6)
108. A lunatic child cured (Matt 17:14; Mark 9:14; Luke 9:37)
109. Two blind men cured (Matt 20:29; Mark 10:46; Luke 18:35)
110. Jesus walks on the sea (Matt 14:25; Mark 6:48; John 6:15)
111. Jesus feeds 5,000 "in a desert place" (Matt 14:15; Mark 6:30; Luke 9:10; John 6:1-14)
112. Many fulfilled prophecies (also see: prophets)
113. The conception of Jesus Christ by the Holy Ghost (Luke 1:35)
114. Star of Bethlehem
115. The transfiguration (Matt 17:1-8)
116. The resurrection (John 21:1-14)
117. The ascension (Luke 2:42-51)
118. Peter and the healing of a the paralytic AEneas at Lydda (Acts 9:32, 35, 38)
119. Miraculous ability to speak and/or understand a foreign language (tongue) previously unknown to the speaker (See: Gift of tongues)
120. Inspiration of Scripture by God