Debunking Noah's Flood

[pupdog]

"Noah was a mariner who sailed around the sea,
With half a dozen wives and a big menagerie.
He failed the first season when it rained for forty days,
For in that sort of weather, no circus ever pays."

(Old Bible Story)

 

[davefoc]

It seems that Noah's are believers might be divided into three groups:

1. Literalists
2. Secularists
3. Reconcilers

Literalists
Most of the posts in a Noah's ark thread deal with this group. And for good reason, this group is what makes Noah's ark threads fun. Images of great firmanents with windows opening up to let the rain fall through (my little homage to Corplinx there) or thoughts of Noah stomping around Australia gathering up Kangaroo species are always fun.

Secularists
This group wants to find some particular event that could have served as the inspiration for the myth. The problem is that there have been lots of floods. Unless one could find some corroborating detail tieing Noah's flood to an historical event one there's little reason to see one flood as more likely to be Noah's flood as any other. And it seems very unlikely that any such corroboration will be made.

Reconcilers
Reconcilers are aware of the apparent contradictions between the flood myth and anything resembling reality. But they also start from the position that the Bible is a divinely inspired reliable source. So they work to reconcile the two views. They do this by substantially modifying the flood myth that the bible apparently describes to one that fits better with a modern scientific view of the world. The big modification to the flood myth that reconcilers make is to reduce the scope of the flood to a localized event. This solves all sorts of problems for the myth. Plants can easily survive because the continue to live in the area not covered by the flood and Noah doesn't need to gather up all the animals to continue their propagation since most of them live on land not covered by the flood.

The justifications for the modifications to the flood myth are based on a variety of ideas. Amongst them is that the original divinely inspired Hebrew bible has been misinterpreted by translaters that weren't divinely inspired.

ReasonedFaith put together a list of links and a little description of this approach that I have copied here since it seemed like a fair representation of how what I call a reconciler sees the flood.

As to the flood.

Again, many Christians, particularly those with a scientific background, believe that the flood evidence, (both Biblical and empirical), indicates that the flood of Noah was a 'Universal' flood, not a worldwide one. That is, a flood within the Mesopotamian Valley which was the "known world" to Noah at the time, and thus accurately characterized from Noah's perspective as 'worldwide'.

Good summary descriptions of why this view holds sway among scientific minded Christians can be reviewed at the following sites.

http://www.evidence.info/apologetics/localflood.html

http://www.kiva.net/~kls/index.html

http://www.reasons.org/resources/ap...lood.shtml?main

http://www.answersincreation.org/

http://lordibelieve.org/page15.html


Fuller treatments of the issues surrounding sound interpretation of Genesis can be found in books like;

The Genesis Question / Dr. Hugh Ross

 

[Johnny Pneumatic]

Again, many Christians, particularly those with a scientific background, believe that the flood evidence, (both Biblical and empirical), indicates that the flood of Noah was a 'Universal' flood, not a worldwide one. That is, a flood within the Mesopotamian Valley which was the "known world" to Noah at the time, and thus accurately characterized from Noah's perspective as 'worldwide'.

The problem with a local flood is why would the ark have to be built and the animals? They could have just walked out of the valley to escape instead of wasting a century building a floating zoo. They are also calling god a lier because....

Genesis 6:19 And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.

2Ti 3:16 All scripture [is] given by inspiration of God, and [is] profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:

 

[Segnosaur]

It seems that Noah's are believers might be divided into three groups:

1. Literalists
2. Secularists
3. Reconcilers

I wouldn't necessarily consider all these as "Noah's believers".

Yes, a Literalist really is a 'believer', and is willing to discount evidence that conflicts with his beliefs. However, the Secularist likely doesn't believe in a biblical Noah; they are looking at the current situation (a story that exists) and are asking "how did this myth come about?", with the assumption that the answer is not supernatural. They are actually searching for answers, and I think its a valid line of inquiry.

 

[davefoc]

I agree about the word, believer. I was searching for a different word when I wrote that. Perhaps persons interested in the Noah's Ark story would have been better.

I have read a few of the links associated with what I called the reconcilers. I hope somebody feels like commenting on them, but frankly for me pouring through arguments about the original meaning of hebrew words and difficult interpretations of what seems straightforward text is more effort than I feel like committing to this thread.

I take part in Noah's Ark threads to think about Noah sexing crocodiles, gathering up Kangaroos in Australia, dancing around naked, etc. and esoteric discussion of biblical minutia is just not that fun for me. If I feel like putting in this kind of effort I'll check out a relativity thread and try to make sense of that.

edited to add:
I shouldn't have ignored BewareOfOldDogmas contributions to the reconciler discussion. Thank you.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

What irritates me about ' Noah's Ark ', is that it is the favorite, little cutesey Sunday School story that it is..

It is actually a horror story, and along with the bearded old man and funny little boat with giraffe heads sticking out the top, they should include a ' scratch and sniff ' of the rotting corpses that must have greeted them atop of Mt. Arrarat..

The true story ( if it were true ) would be more like this..

Hurricane that wrecked Galveston was deadliest in U.S. history

"He could hear children calling for their mothers, women screaming for help and men begging for mercy from God," said MacDonald, a Galveston native and an amateur expert on the storm.

"He said he could hear sounds that were very faint, then they grew louder and louder, then the sound abruptly cut off, and he knew someone's life had ended."

Just multiply it by a factor of a few thousand..

But of course the rainbow at the end made everything O.K...

 

[Taeolas]

Or maybe the bible is just a collection of ancient urban legends?

That's it! The Bible is an early version of snopes.com! Just through the years the links to the explanations of the original stories got lost in some ancient Babylonian server's harddrive, so all we have left is the initial stories.

 

[exarch]

Originally posted by Segnosaur
I wouldn't necessarily consider all these as "Noah's believers".

Yes, a Literalist really is a 'believer', and is willing to discount evidence that conflicts with his beliefs. However, the Secularist likely doesn't believe in a biblical Noah; they are looking at the current situation (a story that exists) and are asking "how did this myth come about?", with the assumption that the answer is not supernatural. They are actually searching for answers, and I think its a valid line of inquiry.

Would this be a good time to bring up the Mediterranean Island Santorini as another example of such a search for the root of a myth?

And with recent movie-releases in mind, what about Troy? That was assumed to be a myth until the city was actually discovered.

 

[Hexxenhammer]

And with recent movie-releases in mind, what about Troy? That was assumed to be a myth until the city was actually discovered.

But they didn't find the remains of the Trojan Horse in the real Troy. I think that is a more appropriate comparison.

 

[davefoc]

exarch asked:

Would this be a good time to bring up the Mediterranean Island Santorini as another example of such a search for the root of a myth?

I think the search for Atlantis is a reasonable comparison with the search for evidence of the Noah flood myth. Atlantis is likely to be enitirely made up and even if there was a particular destroyed city that served as the inspiration for the myth there is not enough information in the myth to pin down the myth to a particular destroyed city. I know Santorini has been put forward but so have lots of places.

Troy is different, in the same way that biblical stories about David are. The myth has certain details in it that archeology may eventually confirm or refute. In the case of Troy, The area in Turkey identified with Troy today has not been definitively confirmed as Troy, but there has been enough corroborating information discovered to suggest that it is.

Noah's flood is different. Many of the predictions that the myth makes have a supernatural nature and I don't believe them for that reason. I don't see very much in the rest of the myth that has the potential to be archeologically verified. IMHO, the parts of the myth that might be geologically verified are too vague when the implausible elements are eliminated to be correlated with any real world event.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

Troy is different, in the same way that biblical stories about David are. The myth has certain details in it that archeology may eventually confirm or refute. In the case of Troy, The area in Turkey identified with Troy today has not been definitively confirmed as Troy, but there has been enough corroborating information discovered to suggest that it is.
.............................

I found this excellent site about Troy
http://devlab.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/lessons/27.html

It suggests that no historical city of Troy existed anywhere ... ( a' la' Nazareth ? )

More recently, Meyer (1975) has gone well beyond Carpenter in dissociating a historical Troy from the mound at Hisarlik. In Meyer's view, no historical city of Troy existed anywhere. First of all, there never was a city called Troy: the Homeric Troie is an adjectival formation derived from the name of a people, the Troes. The conjunction of Troie and Ilion to refer to one and the same place, a city, is a late development. Both the Troes and the settlement of Ilion are to be located in Greece, not in northwestern Asia Minor. The names were transferred to Hisarlik in the process of the Aeolic occupation of Asia Minor in the 8th century B.C. The original homeland of the Troes, the antagonists of the Achaeans who themselves can only be located in Achaia-Phthiotis near Mt. Othrys, is in fact the upper Spercheios River valley, the southern border between central Greece and Thessaly.

There is a lot more... Interesting stuff...

 

[davefoc]

Diogenes,
I read through your link. Thank you.

I think to some degree it makes my point, which was not that Hirsalik was actually the site of Troy, but rather that the myth was rich enough in plausible details that there was a chance that archeological research could prove it or disprove it someday.

As I stated, I don't think there are sufficient plausible details in the Noah flood myth to make any kind of archeological contradiction or validation likely at all. As one small example, take the boat. Without external supernatural/extraterrestial intervention 3000 years ago nobody was building 450 foot boats. If one hypothesizes a more likely size then one is just left with finding a boat that might have been constructed in the likely time frame without any hope of attributing it to Noah.

For the reconcilers the lack of archeological corroboration is hardly a problem at all. For them the reliability of the bible is a given, they just need to expend a lot of effort to massage the story into something consistent with modern views of reality, There seems to be a lot of flexibilty to accomplish something like this by tweaking the original hebrew translations, by taking advantage of ambiguities in the text and by focusing on passages that support the view of a plausible flood myth.

 

[TillEulenspiegel]

That's the problem with legends , people confuse the objective reality with the Myths.

Try here :
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/blacksea/ax/frame.html