This chapter focuses on Noah’s Ark, not because Jones thinks the ship ever existed, but because it provides a clue on the subject of financial security and planning for the inevitable demise of death. And also the fact that he once featured in an advertisement for the insurance company Equitable Life that he unfortunately failed to ‘think about tomorrow’ by not properly investing clients’ money. As a result, his pension arm ended up as a doomed ‘Ponzi’ scheme whereby contributions from new clients were used to pay pensions owed to older clients rather than invested for the future.
Jones discusses a variety of natural disasters, including floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, and the difficulty of predicting them early enough to take any precautions. Although he ruled out Noah’s Flood, he of course knows from geology that there have been many floods of varying magnitude in modern times and also in the remote past.
the sources of the abyss
He then compares Noah’s obedience to God to that of a customer who takes out an insurance policy. Disregarding the Genesis account, he cites Johann Scheuchzer’s theory that God created the ‘mythical’ flood by opening the ‘Fountains of the Deep’, in particular by stopping the rotation of the earth but allowing the seas to gush over it. the earth.
He makes the interesting point that Darwin’s early supporters, such as Lyell, rejected ‘catastrophism’ in favor of ‘uniformitarianism’, the theory that all sedimentary rocks formed very slowly over millions of years to give evolution the ‘deep time’ some shred of credibility was required. However, after evolution settled in, and apparently won the war against Genesis, they gladly accepted the clear evidence from geology that massive catastrophes had indeed occurred: floods, earthquakes, and volcanic activity.
Of course, uniformitarianism had the appeal, on the basis of assumed sedimentation rates, which made possible speculative calculations of the huge stretches of ‘deep time’ supposedly taken to form various rock strata. A similar situation now exists in which assumed gene mutation rates make it possible to calculate the time it supposedly took various organisms to evolve from a given common ancestor.
Sadly, many ‘creationists’ still reject ‘deep time’, apparently fearful that it might prove Darwin right. As a result, they continue to scientifically discredit the Genesis account, as did the theologians of Galileo’s day who insisted that the sun revolved around the earth and that the Bible said so.
noah’s ark
One of the reasons for ruling out the Flood, Jones argues, is that the Ark would have to have been impossibly huge to carry all sorts of animals, including, according to ‘young earth’ advocates, all those dinosaurs. However, full-size copies of the vessel described in Genesis have apparently been made. Of course, we don’t know how many ‘kinds’ of animals existed in Noah’s day, or if additional varieties or breeds were developed later.
Looking at the variety of dogs that have developed from the pair taken on the Ark, amazing variation is clearly possible, but still within the confines of the original ‘types’, a fact of life exploited by dog breeders. plants and animals thousands of years before Darwin. came on the scene, the process of ‘micro-evolution’.
Ark issues are discussed and resolved on creationist websites. For example, did the creatures go into some kind of hibernation during the flood? And it would be nice if Jones applied his vast knowledge and intellect to defending God’s Word, rather than attacking and despising it. You might be in for a few surprises, such as the account of Jacob’s cattle-rearing methods, which he mentioned in an earlier chapter, which until recently were considered nonsensical superstitions.
Finally, after analyzing the instability of the world’s climate, Jones concludes, from the demise of Equitable Life, that it is time for “every citizen to build their own financial coffer”.