Cosmic rays streamed through Earth's atmosphere 41k years ago

The OT is 1000s of years of pre-Christian history that was mostly told by word of mouth, all captured on parchment 1000s of years after it happened. Then it was all selectively collected and copy edited into a single volume another 1300 years after the period of the old testament ended.

Sure, some events in the OT probably happened, but if I go by how much I exaggerate sometimes when telling a story, the Great Flood probably was just a dam that broke it's banks or something. Also doesn't help that every major culture that's old enough has a Great Flood in their history somewhere. It's almost like it's a TV trope of the ancient times.

Nothing in the OT can be ascribed to christianity alone. Things were much more... "fluid" then, and the concept of organised religion did not exist. Things happened, and people blamed the gods/demons/monsters/spirits/forefathers. Only after the fact were these stories appropriated by organised religion for whatever purpose or reason.

Folks living 100s of years: maybe they lived 100s of full moons, or seasons? Maybe the number was rounded up with every retelling to make the subject of the story appear more heroic? There is just no way that we can ever filter out the fact from the fiction in these old books I think.

Fun thing about the Noah 'story' is that the exact same story is present in Hinduism.

It goes something like, God selected a righteous person to help humanity survive the flood. He has this individual built a big ship in which humanity and animals can survive. The only difference in the story is that God took a form of small fish which grew larger as the flood date came close. In the end it became so big that it was able to steer the big ship during flood waves.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsya

If anything, cosmic rays would (stochastically) seed clouds. Constant cloudiness would suggest that Earth was under bombardment at that time.

(1) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1076964

Fake news is not a modern concept.

It goes back a little earlier, but if you pardon the pun, Young Earth Creationism is itself a fairly young theology. The predominant idea behind YEC stems from the 1920s and Seventh Day Adventism, particularly Ellen G. White who claims she had a vision of man and dinosaurs walking the Earth together. Her claims would have disappeared into history as the ramblings of a cultish leader until they were more or less popularized by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb—and yes, in the 1960s.

There's a lot of bonkers theology that rose to popular culture during that time period. Incidentally, it's also when Gog/Magog were ascribed to Russia (because of the Cold War), and if you read the papers by Dr. Paul Tanner on the subject, it becomes quite clear that the extent of exegesis performed basically amounts to cross-linguistic homophones—that is, that one of the regions (princes?) listed in Ezekiel, Rosh, happens to sound like the Indo-european root "Rus." Therefore, obviously, it's Russia... Facepalm.

I'm a Christian, and I lean more toward Dr. John Walton's view of Genesis 1, that it was intended as a functional description of the created order. We forget that the culture that produced the Bible was vastly different from our own, and the Israelites saw things as "uncreated" if they served no purpose. That is, the idea of nihility (or creation ex nihilo) are modern ideas that we have imposed on the text in order to satisfy a narrow reading of scripture. Even if you're not a believer, as one of my sibling comments suggests, the oral tradition itself seems to capture events from the end of the last period of glaciation.

But to assume people lived for 100s of years despite the fact we know almost nothing about the period during which the primordial history (Genesis 1-11) was authored (and we know little about how/when it was redacted, though most probably during the Exile) is naive. The ages most likely conveyed some meaning themselves, because the early Israelites were much less interested in exacting chronology than we are.

Here's an example: Sarah is said to have lived 127 years. Interestingly, 7 being the number of completeness/perfection in Israelite culture and 120 (or 110) representing the same in early Egyptian culture seems to convey the idea that she lived the "perfect" (or "complete") life as both an Egyptian and Israelite woman. This may be stretching the numerology somewhat, but if you step outside YEC material, there is some scholarship that makes a pretty strong case for this reading.

> cosmic ray energy has a spectrum and the changed geomag field would bend the pass through spectrum and likely allowed more high energy gamma's through

The earth magnetic field has no shielding effect on gamma rays at all (which are photons), only on charged particles (protons, electrons and their heavier variants: muons and hypothetically tau leptons but IDK if there are any of them in cosmic rays)

Interesting book, very hard to tell whether you're a serious twue believer or just engaged in some wry leg pulling:

    Howy Jacobs in Nature labelled the book as semi-fictional with the majority of the information "the accounts of the imagined lives" of human ancestors. He commented: "All this made me feel that I was reading someone's school project, with influences from The Flintstones cartoon series, rather than a treatise by a leading academic."

The wikipedia summary didn't give a time frame for the book events, however the Laschamp event was 42 thousand years before prest .. after the settling of coastal and much of inland Asia, Australia, etc.

It seems a little near in time for a literal bottleneck of seven women's genetics, I feel even Bryan Sykes would have pushed back his dating of the seven clan mothers further than a mere 42 kyears.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laschamp_event

I feel like the first two clauses are explained neatly by the third clause.

It's how that font came to Earth