Noah's Global Flood Never Occurred

RabidAlpaca · Jul 26, 2014

I find it rather difficult to believe at times that in today's day and age there are really religious people so ignorant as to claim that the bible is the literal truth, as we know for a fact that it is not. I'd like to take the absolute simplest example to refute: the global flood involving Noah and his ark.

Essentially, the world was wicked, but Noah and his family were righteous, so god wanted to wipe the slate clean and start over. It has been calculated many times by Christians that the global flood occurred around approximately 2300 B.C. If the Bible did one thing very well, it was list the lineages of families throughout the generations, so people were able to start at historical events that we know happened and work backwards. Here are the (Christian) sources showing the logic behind that, which I for the purpose of this thread will consider as correct. [SOURCE1] [SOURCE2]

The second thing to note is that the Bible claims the flood was global, and that it killed every man, woman, child and land based animal other than Noah's family and the animals on board.

Genesis 7:20-21 said:
"The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits. Every living thing that moved on land perished--birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind."

Here is where the tremendous problem arises with the logic of this. A lot of things happened in the third millennium BC, but worldwide extinction is absolutely, positively, factually, not one of them. The world was teaming with a multitude of different societies consisting of different races, languages and cultures, and these societies existed before, during and after the alleged global flood. Instead of a global extermination, the world population the third millennium BC doubled from 15 million to 30 million.

(Note, this is not even close to all of the existing cultures at the time!)

The general Christian answer that I seem to get is that Noah's family quickly reproduced and replaced the world's population and things continued on, but such a traumatic disaster would take hundreds, if not thousands of years to recover from.

Are we really to believe that Noah's family had inbred sex with each other enough times to produce Chinese, Egyptians, South Americans, Africans, Northern Europeans, etc. all immediately, at which point they traveled quickly to all ends of the world, to continue those exterminated cultures exactly where they left off?

Further reading:
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/3rd_millennium_BC.html

Quag · Jul 26, 2014

Bible literalists cannot be reasoned with.

Dragonfly · Jul 26, 2014

WHAT?????????

The Earth and Universe are NOT 6000 years old??????

There was no Adam and Eve who were not only white, but also had belly buttons, talked perfect English, and wore fig leaves over their private parts???????

Dinosaur bones were not "planted" on Earth as some kind of diversion or distraction?

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo..............................................

joG · Jul 26, 2014

I always thought that it was a question of keeping the explanation simple just think how complicated everything would have become if God had started explaining Big Bang Theory to Noah. The guy would never have been able to concentrate on the job at hand and wouldn't have gotten finished. The Old Testament would have been washed away in a local flooding event.

So the Creator in his eternal wisdom kept his trap shut. Good move for Noah. Huh?

MaggieD · Jul 26, 2014

RabidAlpaca said:
I find it rather difficult to believe at times that in today's day and age there are really religious people so ignorant as to claim that the bible is the literal truth, as we know for a fact that it is not. I'd like to take the absolute simplest example to refute: the global flood involving Noah and his ark.

Essentially, the world was wicked, but Noah and his family were righteous, so god wanted to wipe the slate clean and start over. It has been calculated many times by Christians that the global flood occurred around approximately 2300 B.C. If the Bible did one thing very well, it was list the lineages of families throughout the generations, so people were able to start at historical events that we know happened and work backwards. Here are the (Christian) sources showing the logic behind that, which I for the purpose of this thread will consider as correct. [SOURCE1] [SOURCE2]

The second thing to note is that the Bible claims the flood was global, and that it killed every man, woman, child and land based animal other than Noah's family and the animals on board.

Here is where the tremendous problem arises with the logic of this. A lot of things happened in the third millennium BC, but worldwide extinction is absolutely, positively, factually, not one of them. The world was teaming with a multitude of different societies consisting of different races, languages and cultures, and these societies existed before, during and after the alleged global flood. Instead of a global extermination, the world population the third millennium BC doubled from 15 million to 30 million.

(Note, this is not even close to all of the existing cultures at the time!)

The general Christian answer that I seem to get is that Noah's family quickly reproduced and replaced the world's population and things continued on, but such a traumatic disaster would take hundreds, if not thousands of years to recover from.

Are we really to believe that Noah's family had inbred sex with each other enough times to produce Chinese, Egyptians, South Americans, Africans, Northern Europeans, etc. all immediately, at which point they traveled quickly to all ends of the world, to continue those exterminated cultures exactly where they left off?

Further reading:
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/3rd_millennium_BC.html

If one believes there was an Ice Age, it's not hard to extrapolate massive flooding.

Still, I don't believe the Bible is a literal read.

sookster · Jul 26, 2014

You cannot refute however the records of countless fallen societies depicting a vast flood. Maybe the flood wasn't worldwide, but consumed what was thought to be worldwide. There was indeed a major one, and the Christian ideology provide one explanation. Personally, I believe Moses to be a schizophrenic and a very avid writer. But I still have a hard time explaining the multiple accounts of Jesus. I do know however, that it would of been very easy to manipulate the texts a certain way, and I wouldn't put it past the church.

Would there be a record of a vast flood earlier in Earth's history? Would it be strong enough to wipe out most of life? That would show evidence that the whole notion that the Earth is 6000 years old is false, as it obviously is.

RabidAlpaca · Jul 26, 2014

MaggieD said:
If one believes there was an Ice Age, it's not hard to extrapolate massive flooding.

Still, I don't believe the Bible is a literal read.

The ice age was over 11,500 years ago, or about 7,200 years before the alleged global flood, so it has absolutely nothing to do with it. We're closer to Noah than Noah was to the ice age.

Second, these stories are the core foundation for the Abrahamic religions, and if we know they're false, what does that say about the reliability of the rest of the book?

sookster said:
You cannot refute however the records of countless fallen societies depicting a vast flood. Maybe the flood wasn't worldwide, but consumed what was thought to be worldwide. There was indeed a major one, and the Christian ideology provide one explanation. Personally, I believe Moses to be a schizophrenic and a very avid writer. But I still have a hard time explaining the multiple accounts of Jesus. I do know however, that it would of been very easy to manipulate the texts a certain way, and I wouldn't put it past the church.

Would there be a record of a vast flood earlier in Earth's history? Would it be strong enough to wipe out most of life? That would show evidence that the whole notion that the Earth is 6000 years old is false, as it obviously is.

Except the bible very explicitly states that all of mankind except for Moses was to be killed. That was god's explicit and quoted purpose for doing it. We know mankind wasn't exterminated at that point or anywhere near it. Geologists can pinpoint periods of major floods, and the 3rd millennium BC wasn't one of them. If you have evidence of many cultures dying out from floods during this time period, please post it here.

Dezaad · Jul 26, 2014

RabidAlpaca said:
I find it rather difficult to believe at times that in today's day and age there are really religious people so ignorant as to claim that the bible is the literal truth, as we know for a fact that it is not. I'd like to take the absolute simplest example to refute: the global flood involving Noah and his ark.

Essentially, the world was wicked, but Noah and his family were righteous, so god wanted to wipe the slate clean and start over. It has been calculated many times by Christians that the global flood occurred around approximately 2300 B.C. If the Bible did one thing very well, it was list the lineages of families throughout the generations, so people were able to start at historical events that we know happened and work backwards. Here are the (Christian) sources showing the logic behind that, which I for the purpose of this thread will consider as correct. [SOURCE1] [SOURCE2]

The second thing to note is that the Bible claims the flood was global, and that it killed every man, woman, child and land based animal other than Noah's family and the animals on board.

Here is where the tremendous problem arises with the logic of this. A lot of things happened in the third millennium BC, but worldwide extinction is absolutely, positively, factually, not one of them. The world was teaming with a multitude of different societies consisting of different races, languages and cultures, and these societies existed before, during and after the alleged global flood. Instead of a global extermination, the world population the third millennium BC doubled from 15 million to 30 million.

(Note, this is not even close to all of the existing cultures at the time!)

The general Christian answer that I seem to get is that Noah's family quickly reproduced and replaced the world's population and things continued on, but such a traumatic disaster would take hundreds, if not thousands of years to recover from.

Are we really to believe that Noah's family had inbred sex with each other enough times to produce Chinese, Egyptians, South Americans, Africans, Northern Europeans, etc. all immediately, at which point they traveled quickly to all ends of the world, to continue those exterminated cultures exactly where they left off?

Further reading:
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/3rd_millennium_BC.html

When I started at my current place of employment, I was conversing with a new fellow employee. He was college educated, in a science, no less. So, when he started seriously describing how Noah's flood occurred, I literally thought he was kidding, and showed it. Immediately after that I was speechless.

How an accredited school can turn out a student who still believes in Noah's global flood (and make no mistake, he stuck to the plain meaning of The Bible, and held to the global flood idea)... How we can turn out a student who obviously didn't get what he was taught, kills me. It would almost be better if he had just been willfully ignorant, but to have read cockamamie explanations about how it was true, and believed them, was even worse.

Dezaad · Jul 26, 2014

joG said:
I always thought that it was a question of keeping the explanation simple just think how complicated everything would have become if God had started explaining Big Bang Theory to Noah. The guy would never have been able to concentrate on the job at hand and wouldn't have gotten finished. The Old Testament would have been washed away in a local flooding event.

So the Creator in his eternal wisdom kept his trap shut. Good move for Noah. Huh?

Well, then, we can cherry pick what we think is real and true all the way through the Bible, given that rationale.

ashurbanipal · Jul 26, 2014

One thing about this that has puzzled historians is that a massive flood is attested in a pretty wide range of early cultural myths. There are a couple of ways to handle this: there may have been one or two prehistoric floods which looked to people in roughly 5,000 B.C. like a global flood, and those legends were then disseminated over a couple thousand years so that, by the time Genesis was composed, it had to be included.

I like a different explanation. There's absolutely no evidence that a global flood ever happened. But water is heavy in symbolism. It seems to represent what we've come to call the subconscious mind (I think this is a misnomer, but that's an argument for another time), from which all kinds of fantastic images and forms emerge.

We know that there was a time in the prehistory of homo sapiens before there was anything resembling civilization. No art, no apparent religion or spiritual belief, no evidence of political structure, and so on. Then, roughly 35,000 B.C.E., everywhere around the world, we start seeing evidence of civilization springing forth almost fully formed. There are ritualized burials, not merely scattered pieces of art but vast cave complexes decorated with artistic representations of apparently well-developed mythologies, and so on. This is a puzzle to anthropologists. I suspect that the legends of a global flood represent a great shift in human consciousness that probably wasn't instantaneous, but somehow took place over just a few centuries.

Gathomas88 · Jul 26, 2014

RabidAlpaca said:
I find it rather difficult to believe at times that in today's day and age there are really religious people so ignorant as to claim that the bible is the literal truth, as we know for a fact that it is not. I'd like to take the absolute simplest example to refute: the global flood involving Noah and his ark.

Essentially, the world was wicked, but Noah and his family were righteous, so god wanted to wipe the slate clean and start over. It has been calculated many times by Christians that the global flood occurred around approximately 2300 B.C. If the Bible did one thing very well, it was list the lineages of families throughout the generations, so people were able to start at historical events that we know happened and work backwards. Here are the (Christian) sources showing the logic behind that, which I for the purpose of this thread will consider as correct. [SOURCE1] [SOURCE2]

The second thing to note is that the Bible claims the flood was global, and that it killed every man, woman, child and land based animal other than Noah's family and the animals on board.

Here is where the tremendous problem arises with the logic of this. A lot of things happened in the third millennium BC, but worldwide extinction is absolutely, positively, factually, not one of them. The world was teaming with a multitude of different societies consisting of different races, languages and cultures, and these societies existed before, during and after the alleged global flood. Instead of a global extermination, the world population the third millennium BC doubled from 15 million to 30 million.

(Note, this is not even close to all of the existing cultures at the time!)

The general Christian answer that I seem to get is that Noah's family quickly reproduced and replaced the world's population and things continued on, but such a traumatic disaster would take hundreds, if not thousands of years to recover from.

Are we really to believe that Noah's family had inbred sex with each other enough times to produce Chinese, Egyptians, South Americans, Africans, Northern Europeans, etc. all immediately, at which point they traveled quickly to all ends of the world, to continue those exterminated cultures exactly where they left off?

Further reading:
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/3rd_millennium_BC.html

As I mentioned in another thread not to no long ago... To be fair here, there are some - still unexplained - events in human history which could very well be considered to be "Noah's flood-esque" in the scope of the destruction they caused, if not necessarily their method.

We know, for instance, that the human race experienced a massive genetic bottleneck sometime between 50,000 and 100,000 B.C. It is estimated that this unknown catastrophe may have very well reduced the human population on Earth, which would have been limited more or less exclusively to the African continent alone at that point in history, down to just a few hundred, or possibly even a few dozen, people.

How Human Beings Almost Vanished From Earth In 70,000 B.C

Assuming that there really is a God, and he really did inspire the Biblical texts, it wouldn't necessarily be out of the question to suggest that this event might've actually been the "flood" in question, rather than the more recent events Biblical literalists overly fixated on "young earth" theory or a literal "deluge" of water insist on searching for.

Frankly, even if you do want to go with a literal "flood" of water, there are some events in the pre-history which support such a notion as well. They simply happen to regional affairs, limited to the Middle East.

Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis

MaggieD · Jul 26, 2014

RabidAlpaca said:
The ice age was over 11,500 years ago, or about 7,200 years before the alleged global flood, so it has absolutely nothing to do with it. We're closer to Noah than Noah was to the ice age.

Second, these stories are the core foundation for the Abrahamic religions, and if we know they're false, what does that say about the reliability of the rest of the book?

Except the bible very explicitly states that all of mankind except for Moses was to be killed. That was god's explicit and quoted purpose for doing it. We know mankind wasn't exterminated at that point or anywhere near it. Geologists can pinpoint periods of major floods, and the 3rd millennium BC wasn't one of them. If you have evidence of many cultures dying out from floods during this time period, please post it here.

That's funny really. You're arguing that the book is fairy tales on the one hand and arguing the timeline it presents as being accurate on the other. Can't have it both ways.

ecofarm · Jul 26, 2014

While a global flood was long ago disproved, a flood of the Fertile Crescent (the location of the agricultural revolution) and someone gathering farm animals into a boat during such is reasonable.

Just like a tower so high that it resulted in different languages is silly as a literal, but the agricultural revolution resulting in a population explosion and expansion would (and did) result in language diversification as people spread out to far away lands. Of course, "being close to God" is a metaphor for learning to plant seeds and not the result of physical tower height. The tower was knowledge, sovereignty (see also: Tree of Knowledge). Adam and Eve took sovereignty in knowing good from evil, Nimrod took sovereignty in knowing how to 'create' food. In both cases, sovereignty was assumed by man (through knowledge) and man was thus punished.

In the Midrash, it said that the top of the tower was burnt, the bottom was swallowed, and the middle was left standing to erode over time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel

That's slash and burn agriculture. The bottom is the soil, from which we eat.

RabidAlpaca · Jul 26, 2014

Gathomas88 said:
As I mentioned in another thread not to no long ago... To be fair here, there are some - still unexplained - events in human history which could very well be considered to be "Noah's flood-esque" in the scope of the destruction they caused, if not necessarily their method.

We know, for instance, that the human race experienced a massive genetic bottleneck sometime between 50,000 and 100,000 B.C. It is estimated that this unknown catastrophe may have very well reduced the human population on Earth, which would have been limited more or less exclusively to the African continent alone at that point in history, down to just a few hundred, or possibly even a few dozen, people.

How Human Beings Almost Vanished From Earth In 70,000 B.C

Assuming that there really is a God, and he really did inspire the Biblical texts, it wouldn't necessarily be out of the question to suggest that this event might've actually been the "flood" in question, rather than the more recent events Biblical literalists overly fixated on "young earth" theory or a literal "deluge" of water insist on searching for.

Frankly, even if you do want to go with a literal "flood" of water, there are some events in the pre-history which support such a notion as well. They simply happen to regional affairs, limited to the Middle East.

Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis

So your hypothesis is that Noah actually came before Moses, and that it was even by 10's of thousands of years? If there was a tremendous flood at that point, it has absolutely nothing to do with the bible, or the people described within it.

The black sea deluge hypothesis also makes no sense because a) it's thousands of years off, and b) it would be a local flood, not a global one. The bible is excruciatingly clear that the flood was global. It also wouldn't make any sense to build a massive ark and collecting all of the world's animals if it could've been avoided by walking west a few weeks?

The facts are simple: A global, man killer flood did not occur within 10,000 years of the earliest events of the bible, much less in the 3rd millennium BC where the early old testament takes place.

ecofarm said:
While a global flood was long ago disproved, a flood of the fertile crescent (the location of the agricultural revolution) and someone gathering farm animals into a boat during such is reasonable.

Just like a tower so high that it resulted in different languages is silly as a literal, but the agricultural revolution resulting in a population explosion and expansion would (and did) can language diversification as people spread out to far away lands.

A local flood makes no sense and does not meet the qualifiers listed in the bible.

MaggieD said:
That's funny really. You're arguing that the book is fairy tales on the one hand and arguing the timeline it presents as being accurate on the other. Can't have it both ways.

Incorrect. What I did was show that your bible conflicts with reality. I didn't write the biblical timeline, and I didn't make the claim that this occurred in 2300 BC. I provided Christian links, feel free to check them out, and you can follow along and do the math from your own bible.

Gathomas88 · Jul 26, 2014

RabidAlpaca said:
So your hypothesis is that Noah actually came before Moses, and that it was even by 10's of thousands of years? If there was a tremendous flood at that point, it has absolutely nothing to do with the bible, or the people described within it.

The black sea deluge hypothesis also makes no sense because a) it's thousands of years off, and b) it would be a local flood, not a global one. The bible is excruciatingly clear that the flood was global. It also wouldn't make any sense to build a massive ark and collecting all of the world's animals if it could've been avoided by walking west a few weeks?

The facts are simple: A global, man killer flood did not occur within 10,000 years of the earliest events of the bible, much less in the 3rd millennium BC where the early old testament takes place.

A local flood makes no sense and does not meet the qualifiers listed in the bible.

Incorrect. What I did was show that your bible conflicts with reality. I didn't write the biblical timeline, and I didn't make the claim that this occurred in 2300 BC. I provided Christian links, feel free to check them out, and you can follow along and do the math from your own bible.

Ummm... Noah was before Moses, and Abraham.

For that matter, why are you assuming that Genesis has a clear cut timeline which be pinned down so precisely in the first place?

Part of your problem here is that you are assuming the views of hard-line Fundamentalist Protestants to be the "last word" on the Bible here. I'm sorry, but they're not.

Not even all Christian sects accept their analysis as being valid. The RCC, for instance, is perfectly willing to accept that many elements of the Old Testament might have been embellished, or meant to be predominantly metaphorical.

You also have to keep in mind that they are working with English translations of the Bible which might not even be valid in the first place. The original Hebrew tended to be far more vague with relation to time, scale, and location.

RabidAlpaca · Jul 26, 2014

Gathomas88 said:
Ummm... Noah was before Moses, and Abraham.

For that matter, why are you assuming that Genesis has a clear cut timeline which be pinned down so precisely in the first place?

Part of your problem here is that you are assuming the views of hard-line Fundamentalist Protestants to be the "last word" on the Bible here. I'm sorry, but they're not.

Not even all Christian sects accept their analysis as being valid. The RCC, for instance, is perfectly willing to accept that many elements of the Old Testament might have been embellished, or meant to be predominantly metaphorical.

You also have to keep in mind that they are working with English translations of the Bible which might not even be valid in the first place. The original Hebrew tended to be far more vague with relation to time, scale, and location.

You're right, I was mistaken about Moses before Noah, but doesn't that kind of prove my point anyway? Genesis was written by someone who wasn't really there for most of it, so we just gotta take his word for it, no matter how much the facts contradict it.

And it's not a fundamentalist position to claim that the flood happened around 2300 BC, it is the main position of Christians in general because that is directly what is expressed in the Bible. Take a look at the links, it's broken down with scriptural references. If the Bible was not lying, Noah's flood happened ballpark 2300 BC, but there is no evidence to be found of it whatsoever.

All you seem to be doing is saying "Oh, well, I guess I'll just move the date back further to a point where we know less, so there's less to contradict it."

Tim the plumber · Jul 26, 2014

I really don't get the Bible apologist's point here.

The Bible is specific about it. Mountains flooded. That never happened.

Just because there may have been a big flood some time which has given rise to some myths does not change the fact of the Bible being wrong.

Paschendale · Jul 26, 2014

I think the biggest evidence is geological. There are very specific things that we would expect to see if a massive flood had engulfed the world. Like a whole lot of mingled fossils at a specific layer of strata, especially plant fossils. There would also be large deposits of ocean salt in that strata, even in places far inland. Neither of these are there.

sookster said:
You cannot refute however the records of countless fallen societies depicting a vast flood. Maybe the flood wasn't worldwide, but consumed what was thought to be worldwide.

Most major human civilizations sprang up in flood plains and around rivers. These are the most fertile places available, but sometimes there were big, unexpected floods in addition to the more predictable ones that allowed for their farming. This is not surprising. But the mistake you're making is "flood" instead of "floods". There were lots of them. In lots of different places. No single, global one.

ashurbanipal said:
One thing about this that has puzzled historians is that a massive flood is attested in a pretty wide range of early cultural myths. There are a couple of ways to handle this: there may have been one or two prehistoric floods which looked to people in roughly 5,000 B.C. like a global flood, and those legends were then disseminated over a couple thousand years so that, by the time Genesis was composed, it had to be included.

See above. Many early civilizations began in places that flooded a lot. It's not really mysterious at all. Your point of the symbolism of water certainly attests to why people made stories about these floods, though.

Summerwind · Jul 26, 2014

sookster said:
You cannot refute however the records of countless fallen societies depicting a vast flood. Maybe the flood wasn't worldwide, but consumed what was thought to be worldwide. There was indeed a major one, and the Christian ideology provide one explanation. Personally, I believe Moses to be a schizophrenic and a very avid writer. But I still have a hard time explaining the multiple accounts of Jesus. I do know however, that it would of been very easy to manipulate the texts a certain way, and I wouldn't put it past the church.

Would there be a record of a vast flood earlier in Earth's history? Would it be strong enough to wipe out most of life? That would show evidence that the whole notion that the Earth is 6000 years old is false, as it obviously is.

Or more likely, every part of the world has, has had, or will have the potential to be flooded, therefore given the narrow scope of "world" to those societies, all thriving societies of the eras had to somewhat be near a water source, that source at some time flooded, not at all necessarily at the same time. Hence no global flood. It's impossible since there are fossils etc that let us know that there was never a totally dead time since humans evolved.

Gathomas88 · Jul 26, 2014

RabidAlpaca said:
You're right, I was mistaken about Moses before Noah, but doesn't that kind of prove my point anyway? Genesis was written by someone who wasn't really there for most of it, so we just gotta take his word for it, no matter how much the facts contradict it.

And it's not a fundamentalist position to claim that the flood happened around 2300 BC, it is the main position of Christians in general because that is directly what is expressed in the Bible. Take a look at the links, it's broken down with scriptural references. If the Bible was not lying, Noah's flood happened ballpark 2300 BC, but there is no evidence to be found of it whatsoever.

All you seem to be doing is saying "Oh, well, I guess I'll just move the date back further to a point where we know less, so there's less to contradict it."

Claiming that the entire world literally flooded over isn't a position that you are going to see many non-fundamentalist Christian sects take these days. It's simply too non-sensical.

As I already pointed out, the major problem with the sects that do believe such things is that they might very well be working off of a mistaken translation of the text in the first place. They could also be interpreting a story which was meant to be taken metaphorically in an overly literal fashion.

The original Hebrew tended to be rather vague in the language it used to denote concepts like time and place. Later translations opted towards more specific interpretations. To use merely one example, the original Hebrew text might not have been talking about the "whole world" flooding to begin with, but only the "known world," as it pertained to the Israelites.

That minor error alone could very well change the entire nature of the story.

In that vein, all I've really done here is point out the historical fact that there have been a number of verifiable events in human history which do bear a striking resemblance to the catastrophe which the story of Noah references. The human race very nearly went extinct as a result of a volcanic eruption or extraterrestrial impact which occurred roughly 70,000 years ago (an event which is believed to have covered the entire world in a 'deluge' of ash and darkness that might've very well lasted for years), and the Mediterranean basin did flood to a rather extensive degree roughly 7000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, probably catching the local population very much by surprise.

Who's to say that these events might not have been the inspiration for the story of Noah?

Tim the plumber said:
I really don't get the Bible apologist's point here.

The Bible is specific about it. Mountains flooded. That never happened.

Just because there may have been a big flood some time which has given rise to some myths does not change the fact of the Bible being wrong.

The point you're missing here is that the story doesn't necessarily have to be "specifically" correct to still be more or less true.

It is the spirit of the thing, and the lesson it conveys, which ultimately matters more than the particular details of the event.

Lethargic Aptitude · Jul 26, 2014

This is pointless, the entire holy bible (even the part added to it later) is one big metaphor and shouldnt be taken literal.

polisciguy · Jul 26, 2014

For me, biblical literalism can cause one to miss the ultimate lesson in the story. For instance, the creation story really isn't about creation at all, rather, it demonstrates how man is unique among the species of Earth, being made in God's image. God spoke light into existence as we speak our ideas into existence. We, unlike most other species, have the ability to manipulate virtually every feature of our environment to "create" and demonstrate our dominance over it, just as God did with creation. I think the creation story isn't even an attempt to answer the question of where we came from or why we are here, but rather demonstrates how man is made in God's image. Or perhaps both. I don't know, that's always been my interpretation. Not trying to ruffle any feathers.

TL,DR I agree, and would say that biblical literalism can rob one of a deeper connection to the text.

DifferentDrummr · Jul 26, 2014

Before the end of the last Ice Age, the Black Sea was actually a freshwater lake, and there's evidence of quite a few human settlements on its shores.

When the ice over the Bosporus melted, there would certainly have been what seemed like global flooding, and, even though it was a prehistoric event, it was probably passed down orally for many generations. I'm betting that was the inspiration for the Hebrews to write the Noah story. (Which, like most biblical stories, was probably not meant to be taken literally. To the ancient Hebrew culture, the morals of stories were far more important.)

Muhammed · Jul 26, 2014

RabidAlpaca said:
The second thing to note is that the Bible claims the flood was global,

Where does it say that?

Where did it say it was "global"?

RabidAlpaca · Jul 26, 2014

Gathomas88 said:
Claiming that the entire world literally flooded over isn't a position that you are going to see many non-fundamentalist Christian sects take these days. It's simply too non-sensical.

As I already pointed out, the major problem with the sects that do believe such things is that they might very well be working off of a mistaken translation of the text in the first place. They could also be interpreting a story which was meant to be taken metaphorically in an overly literal fashion.

The original Hebrew tended to be rather vague in the language it used to denote concepts like time and place. Later translations opted towards more specific interpretations. To use merely one example, the original Hebrew text might not have been talking about the "whole world" flooding to begin with, but only the "known world," as it pertained to the Israelites.

That minor error alone could very well change the entire nature of the story.

In that vein, all I've really done here is point out the historical fact that there have been a number of verifiable events in human history which do bear a striking resemblance to the catastrophe which the story of Noah references. The human race very nearly went extinct as a result of a volcanic eruption or extraterrestrial impact which occurred roughly 70,000 years ago (an event which is believed to have covered the entire world in a 'deluge' of ash and darkness that might've very well lasted for years), and the Mediterranean basin did flood to a rather extensive degree roughly 7000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, probably catching the local population very much by surprise.

Who's to say that these events might not have been the inspiration for the story of Noah?

The point you're missing here is that the story doesn't necessarily have to be "specifically" correct to still be more or less true.

It is the spirit of the thing, and the lesson it conveys, which ultimately matters more than the particular details of the event.

Inspiration for the story of Noah? It wasn't literally flooded?

If we're saying the bible can be fantasy instead of fact at times and things aren't meant literally, maybe non-believers won't actually go to hell, as it was just a metaphor. When you base your life on a single book, and that book is full of things that we know are false, you end up having people just making up things to keep their world picture in tact, not unlike what you're doing with "Maybe it was another local flood somewhere".

If you had a friend that repeatedly lied to you and embelished stories, would you trust his testimony with 100% faith or approach it with skepticism?

Muhammed said:
Where does it say that?

Where did it say it was "global"?

If you're too lazy to read the OP, I'm not going to engage in conversation with you.

Noah's Global Flood Never Occurred

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