JS:
"If the Buddhist "theory" of creation were proven correct, that would also have a fairly big impact on my day-to-day life and thoughts."
Mine too. But when we're left with non-scientifically proven theories, when actually considered, the only remaining comparison is the religious. And I'm more than happy to engage someone on the comparative religion level. Of course, the end result is also the same, a faith is needed, but from my standpoint, less faith is needed to believe what I've acccepted, than other faiths I have studied and compared.
"Do you question the inverse square law because the observed elliptical orbits of the planets (the best evidence for the inverse-square law) might be the result of yo-yo strings tied to them?"
No, because we haven't detected any yo-yo strings.
and I'm beginning to think we should have started our discussion with this:
"Well, assuming that the global flood was not followed up by a string of miracles, we would expect to find nothing. An ecology disrupted as catastrophically as it would be by a global flood, the environment would not support the continuation of human life. We could expect not to be here to find anything at all. If an alien life form landed here and had a look around, they could expect to find one recent stratum extremely thick, cluttered with fossilized remains of modern organisms, human tools, houses, and uniformly so, all over the world. They could expect to see major anomalies in the chemical composition of one layer of ice cores that dates to the time of the flood, uniformly no matter where on Earth the cores were drilled. They could expect to find a recent genetic bottleneck in all of the organisms that did manage to survive the aftermath of the flood. They could also expect to find some indication of where all of the water went."
"Can you tell me anything that the flood theory predicts that we should find --- that we actually do find?"
This is what I would expect to find:
- A world with water enough to cover all the available land space.
- Massive worldwide layering.
- Water and wind-created land features, mountains, canyons, and more.
- Massive fossil and oil fields.
- Destructive scars evidencing ruptures in the earth from waters "bursting forth" as Genesis says the water came from - underground. The plates themselves seem to be a good place to start.
- Massive uplift and huge water basins as the weight of the water formed vast ocean deeps, and a broken/ruptured crust that would move to fill in pressure elsewhere.
- A record massively layered ice age of massive proportions, perhaps even caps at the coldest and windiest parts of the earth.
- Evidence of worldwide glaciation due to the cooling of the earth's climate by the cooling effect of a massive world-wide, wind-swept ocean.
- marine fossils at the tops of mountains
- massive oil fields in the regions of the most populated areas of Earth before the flood (like the Garden of Eden). Middle East.
- my theory predicts asteroid impacts caused the rupturing of the earth's crust and underground water oceans. Evidence of at least one huge asteroid currently makes up the Gulf of Mexico.
- those asteroids came from somewhere in the Solar System. Evidence should thus be found of this massive sudden storm.
- The Moon would have one side completely potmarked with craters, and the other side relatively untouched by the sudden storm that did cause the flood as it acted as a partial shield for the bigger asteroids. This caused even the moon to one time spew lava because of it's own destruction at the onslaught of this storm.
- The Asteroid Belt - being a suspicious source for this storm that probably swept through the entire system, an exercise only able to affect all planets closest the sun (with increasing pot-marking along the closer to the suns gravity one gets) if it had been an explosion of some kind.. perhaps a planet or body that did once make up the belt that is now there.
- Venus, having an atmosphere before such an event, but ocean-less? would instead be faced with a severe nuclear winter. Mars, being evidence of great destruction as well. In fact, all planets struck would be so thus. A sudden barrage would cause volcanism on all planets that were hit where volcanism was possible.
- think. there is a lot more. heck, I just came up with the last four as I wrote this.
These are just a few things biblical Creationism/Flood Theory would predict, as well as my theory as to what caused the Flood in the first place: the fracturing and disintegration of a small planetary body between Mars and Jupitor.