The Cornwall Alliance is one of several groups devoted to defending traditional Biblical exegesis against the incursions of modernity. Just as the Vatican opposed the threat of heliocentric astronomy in Galileo's day, Dominionist protestant dominies like Cornwall director Dr. Calvin Biesner, Th.D are conducting a Theologically Imperative holding action against the rising tide of anthropogenic climate change.
The Reverend Doctor's logic regarding sea level rise is internally impeccable. Forget the thermal expansion of water in a warming world -- the Earth is the Lord's, and He has said on the record. Genesis 9:11:
So forget anthropogenic climate forcing- nothing much can come of it becase Noah.
Yet while this is the percieved wisdom in many oil Patch Sunday schools many Christian evangelicals, Latter Day Saints and Old Testament fundamentalists who regard this as nothing less than the Word of the Lord are also devotees of Biblical archaeology, and live in hope of one day finding concrete historical evidence of the events Genesis depicts.
Exegesis owes a considerable debt to archaeology. Evangelical tourists venture as far afield from the Holy Land as the mountains of Armenia in search of the resting place of Noah's Ark, and many revere sites like Jericho that archaeologists concede to be five or six millennia older than the Pyramids of Egypt or the ziggurats of Ur of the Chaldees.
However, their cheerful and copacetic embrace of the Song of Gilgamesh, and cuneiform Mesopotamian flood legends as independent and disinterested corroboration of the Biblical flood opens a door leading down into the sub-basement of the archaeology of Genesis. Geophysical research and underwater archaeology have revealed that there was indeed a Flood of Biblical proportions back when ,with writing uninvented, Holy Writ remained unwritten. The event's center was well North of the original Bible Belt, in a land that no longer has a name because it has been under water since the late Neolithic when the Mediterranean cut through the marble lip of then-Isthmus of the Bosphorus , and roared downhill from sea level to flood the low-lying plains that now form the bottom of the Black Sea.
If that is the epic flood of which Genesis speaks, and Noah made his timely escape from it on the Ark, what the Lord said unto him was indeed the Bible truth. Never again can there be a flood that destroys the world that Noah knew, because it no linger exists to be drowned anew. The Reverend Doctor is barking up the wrong tree-
the geological record suggests that the rising tide that drowned Noah's neighborhood arose not from global climate change, but the force of gravity that sent the waters of the Med rushing downhill from sea level to fill a depression lower than Death Valley or the Dead Sea on steroids.
The Reverend Doctor's logic regarding sea level rise is internally impeccable. Forget the thermal expansion of water in a warming world -- the Earth is the Lord's, and He has said on the record. Genesis 9:11:
Thus shall I establish My covenant with you; Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood; never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.
So forget anthropogenic climate forcing- nothing much can come of it becase Noah.
Yet while this is the percieved wisdom in many oil Patch Sunday schools many Christian evangelicals, Latter Day Saints and Old Testament fundamentalists who regard this as nothing less than the Word of the Lord are also devotees of Biblical archaeology, and live in hope of one day finding concrete historical evidence of the events Genesis depicts.
Exegesis owes a considerable debt to archaeology. Evangelical tourists venture as far afield from the Holy Land as the mountains of Armenia in search of the resting place of Noah's Ark, and many revere sites like Jericho that archaeologists concede to be five or six millennia older than the Pyramids of Egypt or the ziggurats of Ur of the Chaldees.
However, their cheerful and copacetic embrace of the Song of Gilgamesh, and cuneiform Mesopotamian flood legends as independent and disinterested corroboration of the Biblical flood opens a door leading down into the sub-basement of the archaeology of Genesis. Geophysical research and underwater archaeology have revealed that there was indeed a Flood of Biblical proportions back when ,with writing uninvented, Holy Writ remained unwritten. The event's center was well North of the original Bible Belt, in a land that no longer has a name because it has been under water since the late Neolithic when the Mediterranean cut through the marble lip of then-Isthmus of the Bosphorus , and roared downhill from sea level to flood the low-lying plains that now form the bottom of the Black Sea.
If that is the epic flood of which Genesis speaks, and Noah made his timely escape from it on the Ark, what the Lord said unto him was indeed the Bible truth. Never again can there be a flood that destroys the world that Noah knew, because it no linger exists to be drowned anew. The Reverend Doctor is barking up the wrong tree-
