When I attended Liberty University in 1983, I remember taking a required class called Creation Studies. The flood of Noah in Genesis was a significant topic of the class, and I recall that an old book from Henry Morris was used to substantiate the great flood story.
I used to be a young earth creationist (YEC). But I eventually came to see how utterly silly and ridiculous the story is.
I really enjoy Seth Andrew’s podcasts on The Thinking Atheist. A while back, he had an episode called “Please read this on the air”, and I think it was from that episode that he read a terrific short piece about Noah’s Ark, which I transcribed below. It’s been sitting in my drafts for awhile now! I don’t know who the original author was, but it’s worth the read.
Hang on a minute, because I don’t believe that a 600 year old man built a battleship-sized wooden boat by hand and then collected at least two of every of the millions of species on earth, including the habitat-specific dietary dependant and symbiotic ones… and then, without electricity, refrigeration, plumbing or air conditioning, was able to house, feed, water, dispose the waste of, and provide veternary care for — all of them (!), without losing a single one [otherwise] thus making an entire species extinct in the process, while the boat floated around during a world wide flood to the height of Mount Everest, for several months… an event that went completely unnoticed by the Egyptians, Chinese, Australian Aboriginese, and every other co-existant society at the time. AND that I don’t believe that somehow plant-life on earth survived the crushing pressure, darkness and salinity of 8 kilometers of water overhead before the water magically receded and the animal species on the ark managed to disembark and traverse the planet to their current locations from the deserts of the Middle East, which according to some included dinosaurs. And because I don’t believe this, I am the strange one???
“an event that went completely unnoticed by the Egyptians, Chinese, Australian Aboriginese, and every other co-existant society at the time”
FWIW, there are loads of flood stories across many, many ancient peoples. To me, that points to there being a non-zero probability that *something* catastrophic happened, perhaps leading to a bottleneck of human population (I think anthropologists have evidence for such a bottleneck, and there might be evidence for a large local flood, something to do with the Black and/or Caspian seas, I think). Those that survived passed on the story of a flood and the story spread, with various details that are different, and various details sometimes in common.
But all this is purely natural. It seems so obvious now that I look at it with an open mind that the creation and flood stories in Genesis are mythology, even if some kind of flood actually happened. What I find hilarious is folks like Answers in Genesis trying to find explanations for how the Genesis flood story happened, as if it is literally true. Since they believe in a God of miracles, it would seem much simpler for them to just say it was a miracle. The more they try to explain it, the more foolish they look.
I totally agree Charles. Great points. And it is very plausible that there was a significant flood (perhaps many) in the distant past that impacted a lot of people. But certainly not a global flood of the magnitude that the book of Genesis writes about, and given our human nature to exaggerate and embellish as time goes by, a regional flood story likely turned into a world-wide, everyone-died (!) story. It is comical now in hindsight.
Yeah, that boat floated around for months but still managed to land in the middle east!
Not before dropping the kangaroos off here in Australia.
Yeah, no GPS. How did he get back to the middle east?
I presume he let his wife ask for directions.