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WillowOne's Positions

Noah's Flood

My Positions

  1. There was no global flood. The claim is falsified by geology, biology, archaeology and arithmetic.
  2. The story is a reworking of older Mesopotamian flood myths, and it is better literature in the original.
  3. This is the clearest case of a specific religious claim that can be known to be false, in the sense set out under Hard Atheism. A god who did this did not exist; whether some other god did is a separate question.

Notes

  1. The story is borrowed. Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, centuries older than Genesis, has a man warned by a god to build a boat, load it with his family and animals, survive a flood sent to destroy mankind, send out birds to find land, and offer a sacrifice on a mountain to gods who gather round it "like flies". The Atrahasis epic and the Sumerian story of Ziusudra are older still. The Hebrew version is itself two accounts stitched together, which is why the rain lasts forty days in one verse and the waters prevail a hundred and fifty in another, and why Noah takes two of each animal in one chapter and seven pairs of the clean ones in the next.
  2. There is not enough water. Covering the mountains to the height the text requires (Genesis 7:19–20) would take about three times the water that exists on, in and above the Earth. The creationist answers (a vapour canopy, water from under the crust, mountains lower then) either cook the planet, flatten it, or are invented for the purpose (Special Pleading).
  3. The rocks say no. A single year-long global flood would leave one chaotic layer worldwide. Instead the geological column contains fossil soils with root traces, dinosaur nests with eggs laid over seasons, desert dunes, evaporite deposits that need a dry climate, coral reefs that grow a few millimetres a year, and the Grand Canyon's neat alternation of marine and terrestrial strata. Ice cores and tree-ring sequences pass straight through 2348 BC without a ripple. The Egyptian Old Kingdom was building pyramids on either side of that date without noticing it was under water.
  4. The ark cannot have worked. Eight people cannot feed, water and muck out even the few thousand "kinds" that creationists now allow, let alone the millions of species that exist. Freshwater and saltwater fish cannot both survive the same ocean. The kangaroos had to get to Australia afterwards, the sloths to South America, and the lemurs only to Madagascar, leaving no trace along the way. And if a few thousand kinds became today's millions of species in four thousand years, that is a rate of evolution faster than any biologist has ever proposed, demanded by the people who say evolution does not happen.
  5. The genes say no. A species reduced to two individuals leaves a signature in its genome; the cheetah's ancient bottleneck is visible to this day. Nothing like a universal bottleneck in 2348 BC appears in any species, including ours, where a reduction to eight people, three of them brothers, would be written in every chromosome.
  6. The moral problem. The story describes a god who drowns every child, every infant, every animal on Earth, because the adults were wicked, and then promises not to do it again. This is presented to children with cheerful animals on a boat. It belongs under Biblical Morality, and the thought that it is a comforting story tells you how little of it is usually read.
  7. What may lie behind it. Flood stories are common because floods are. The refilling of the Black Sea basin around 5600 BC, or the regular catastrophic floods of the Tigris and Euphrates, are plausible kernels for a story that grew in the telling. A real local flood does not rescue the global one; it explains why someone wrote it down.

Sources

  • George, A. (trans.), The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin, 1999), Tablet XI
  • Montgomery, D. R., The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (2012)
  • Moore, R. A., "The Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark", Creation/Evolution 11 (1983)
  • Ryan, W. and Pitman, W., Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History (1998)
  • Isaak, M., The Counter-Creationism Handbook (2005), section on flood geology

Also see