FIRE!

I emailed a christian friend of mine and asked her “do you believe in Noahs Arc?”
My reason for asking such a question is I wanted to know if she would ever take a position to actually defend the claims that two of all the animals on earth joined an old man on a boat to survive a world flood. A seemingly preposterous idea.
How come some christians can believe such a whopper? They actually can pickup this thousands of years old book and immediately curtail and ‘dis-prove’ libraries of historical research. They deny evolution, plate tectonics, geological time meteorology, etc. And all of their necessary proof of this flood was found through a simple paragraph or two in the old-testament.

The problem lies in what religious people, and non-religious people use for proof of a position. This is the age old question of science versus faith.What system of proof does one need to show that something is genuine or reasonable or fact? Some use science, some use faith.

Say I’m at a movie with my friend. All of the sudden someone in the dark room yells “FIRE!” Immediately we are forced to use our system of proof to determine if this unknown person’s claim is true or not. I’d notice there is no fiery light being emitted in the dark room (besides, perhaps from the screen), I would notice there is no smell of smoke. I could look around and see that other people, closer to the origin of the scream, aren’t running. Whatever methods one would use- eventually you would assure yourself it was a false-alarm and that some asshole is being himself. perhaps there was a fire, perhaps not- I simply mean to illustrate our system of check and balances we use to make an action.

One system of proof are those things we need to run through our head or checkout in order to decide. I think religious people and non-religious people can agree on some levels of proof. Neither a religious person, nor a non-religious person would probably get scared and run from the theatre- they would use their best judgment to determine it was a bad-joke.

Yet, how come they are so quick to support Noah- when more reasonable people would simply point to the obvious disparity in the method of coming to that conclusion. They denied a lot of good scientific-reasoning to get there.
Yet faith in the bible is their only system of proof needed for the belief in Noah’s Arc, or Adam and Eve, or any other amazing biblical story . No other evidence could ever dis-prove it. Nothing. Ever. No matter how conclusive, or how obvious- if the bible says it is true- it is true.

So what is faith?