This is a question for those of you that are believers in the flood.

Attempts by people on this site and others to demonstrate either the illogic of the ark (numberts of animals, shoveling overwhelming amounts of dung, etc) or geologic evidence against it (you seem to have no concept of time) have failed. So I’d like to take a different approach to questioning whether or not the flood actually occurred.

Depending on which Christian I’m talking to, the flood happened about 3,500 to 4,500 years ago. That means that, when it was over, every single human being on earth was well aware of the existence of God, and had no reason to doubt him. Thats because the only ones left were Noah and his family. They’d seen his wrath first-hand; they had blisters on their fingers from cleaning the stalls, and I’m pretty sure that experience would be both memorable and inspiring.

So, we had a small group of presumably inspired and God-fearing people who 1)knew about everything now in the old testament that happened before the flood, because that information has been brought forth, and is available today. That could only be because Noah and his decendents handed it down. Which means they knew about it themselves. All about Adam and Eve and original sin. The really important stuff. And 2) as mentioned above, had no reason to doubt or dismiss the existence of God, having seen his power first hand and all. Presumably they were his advocates, and would teach all of their children about Him and His glory, etc.

A mere one or two thousand years later, when Greece and Rome and Egypt and China and Africa and the Americas were populated by many millions of people, and NOT ONE of them knew of your God!

Right after the flood, only people knowing of your God existed, and within a few generations, the largest percentage of people on earth had forgotten all about him and gone to the trouble to invent Zues and Thor and whoever else they could come up with. Huge civilizations in China were influenced by Budda and Confuscious. People in India, not all that far away, followed Hinduism. American indians didn’t have a clue about Christianity, and there were many versions of religion here. The same held true for every other indigenous population in the world.

Yes, other civilizations and religions have flood stories. But they don’t have your God. Why would they remember the flood in their myths and not your God? The two seem inextricably tied together in your version of the story. I’m trying to picture one of Noah’s great grandsons, who after traveled to a barren China, which was still recovering from the catastrophic affects, and completely unpopulated (It had to be one of Noah’s direct decendants that started the huge civilization there), telling his children “There was a huge flood, see, and everyone in the whole world died, except grandpa Noah, and grandma, and a few aunts and uncles, and it was horrible , but WE were chosen by, oh, gosh I don’t know, some guy, forget his name, to survive. That part must not have been important. But anyway, there was this flood....”

Why would this overwhelming memory of your Christian God only have survived in the part of the world where he was worshipped BEFORE the alleged flood? What would cause the most important details of this catastrophic event to disappear from the cultures of EVERY other group of people on the entire planet? You guys are still running around trying to convert many of these supposedly direct decendants of Noah to Christianity. Why should that be necessary?

Of course, if it didn’t happen, there would be no reason for anyone else to remember it.

But my friend, the flood did happen and will happen again even in your very own life (unless you are a coward, Plato would add or an Englishman, Dostoevski would add).

We are all ark builders in a sense because we all see a point in our life when we will have reached a certain peak in our socio economic environment. After this we plan to coast along on our seniority, savings, assets or whatever else that will have made us the man we always wanted to be. Some would call this our career.

What we fail to realize is that the jungle of life out of wich we carved this image of ourselves will continue to grow around us and may/should/must become the flood that we are called to survive. For this we need an ark and unless we will have contributed 10 % of our time for the purpose of recollecting our days and accomplishments and give due credit to the co-creator that was behind it all we will surely drown in our own solidarity. No money is needed for this but contemplation in the right direction. Hence religion is needed for this and will be sufficient if and only if it is facing us in the right direction (West, to be sure).

Here is a poem for you that I hope you might understand after my prelude to it.

"If he had known
unstructured space is a deluge
and stocked his lifehouse-boat
with all of the animals
......................even the wolves!
he might have floated.

But obstinate he stated
the land is solid
................and stamped!
watching his foot go down
through stone
up to the knee.

The reason why other civilizations remember the flood is because the event descibed by the flood is archetypal to mankind and goes much as I suggested above. That they, other civilizations, do not remember our God is because our God was in our ark and theirs was in theirs . . . as yours will be in yours. If, as you suggest, he is not in your ark you will drown in your own assets when they turn into liabilities if and when you cannot resolve your own answer to the question "who am I" prior to your own death when finally you will be forced to give an answer to that question.

Amos.

I was reading something recently (the book itself was quite old though) in which the author insisted on dating the flood (for biblical reasons) about 20,000 years ago. He would even consider the frozen mamoths in Siberia (which according to him are dated about 10,000 years old) as being a result of the flood because they are too recent.

This argument of course only works over short lengths of time.
~Snip further similiar arguments~

As far as the flood in general goes, I am fairly agnostic. If you take a non-literal reading of the Bible narrative there is certainly the possibility of a local flood only. But there are as you mentioned, other flood stories in different cultures and it's not unreasonable to believe that there was a big flood (local or otherwise) at some stage in the world's history.
As far as the forgetting of God goes the answer is really quite simple. Religions tend to appear, disappear and change on a fairly regular basis... does anyone still worship Baal or the Greek or Roman Gods? So the majority of the world forgetting the original religion should hardly give us pause. The real question to ask is how the Christian religion has managed to be preserved so well down the ages. If we look at some of the OT histories such as Kings and Chronicles we see that the Israelites needed little or no encouragement to stop worshiping Yahweh and start worshiping the Gods of the neighbouring countries. The histories strongly imply that it was only by God's continued reminders that the people didn't forget him.

I hope that answers your questions,

Tercel