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Marduk

Oh Mr. D of D you just don't 'get' fundy thinking, if the supermagician can create an entire universe by snapping his fingers ala 'Q' then he can put all the animals in the world in a wooden boat and still leave room for jello, and make it rain as long as he wants, don't you watch Star Trek???

-DM-

The Flood story is nonsense from start to finish, but the URL that D of D supplies doesn't do much to counteract typical apologetic arguments.

For example, the biblical Flood story doesn't talk about species, but rather "kinds," therefore any Biblicist can discard worries over the number of species that might have been involved in favor of "kinds," arguing that the dog "kind," for example, would include all species of dogs, wolves, foxes, etc. He can also argue, of course, that one pair (or seven pairs in some cases) would suffice given that "God" himself would have watched over Noah and his "kinds." "God" could have supplied mana much like he allegedly did the Israelites during their Exodus and wanderings in the desert. Apologists also argue that the mountains were not as high then as they are now, so any calculations of the amount of rainfall that would have been required would be moot. And then there is always the old saw that "40 days and 40 nights" just means "a long time."

Better to point out such things as that there is no geological evidence of a worldwide flood. One can also point out that the Flood story is older than Noah himself. Its
migration from the earliest known occurrence in Sumeria, around
1600 B.C., from place to place and eventually to the Bible, can
be traced historically. Each time the story was used again, it
was altered to speak of local gods and heroes. This is made clear in one of my favorite books: The Noah's Ark Nonsense by Howard Teeple.

Also, for a perfect, omnipotent creator/god to destroy every man, woman, child, and animal other than those on the Ark because he was unhappy with the wickedness of man--whom He had created--would be like burning down a house to rid it of ants that you had brought into your own house.

--Don--

ex-preacher

An excellent resource on the flood is "The Biblical Flood" by Davis A. Young (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). Young is a Christian geologist who concludes that a global flood did not occur. In his conclusion, he cites three types of evidence which preclude a global flood:

1. "Several centuries of effort to locate physical remnants of the biblical deluge have completely failed."

2. "The evidence is also arrayed against views that confine the action of the flood to the globe's surface features."

3. "In addition the wealth of geological evidence opposing the possibility of a global deluge, a variety of biogeographical evidence also counts conclusively against such an event."

So does Young renouce Christianity? Of course not. He concludes that "We need to find an interpretation of the text that does not commit us to a globe-covering catastrophe." In other words, we'll change our theology just enough to fit the facts. This is what I drives me nuts about liberal Christians. Since they feel free to pick and choose from the Bible, they are unfazed by the fact that the Bible is full of contradictions and historical and scientific mistakes. At least the fundies and skeptics stick to a consistent position: If the Bible is wrong in one place, it is unreliable and not the Word of God. Unfortunately for fundies, it is wrong in lots of places. Thus people like me become atheists instead of liberal Christians.

Incidentally, I find that the most effective sources against fundamentalist Christianity come from liberal Christianity (and vice-versa).

copernicus

The story of the Flood probably had its origin in the creation of the Black Sea, when the level of the Mediterranean rose to the point where it spilled across the Bosporus. It is a fairly well established fact that there used to be a fresh water lake below the current Black Sea and there are well-preserved human relics that date back to ancient times.

The myth of Noah's Flood in the Bible seems to have derived from earlier flood myths, in particular the Gilgamesh tale, which the israelites probably adapted to their own religion during the Babylonian exile.