Why bring science into it? The text doesn’t say it was global.
Only if you demand that it be read as a scientific account. It isn’t.
BTW, have you found where the Bible says it intends to communicate science accurately?
Only if that Christian starts as a naive idiot trying to make the Bible fit a MSWV the way YEC does.
Origen used these facts as an argument for the authenticity of the Gospels.
Yes – it’s a map of the world as ancient fertile crescent inhabitants understood it – a flat earth-disk surrounded by water.
No, it only means that there have been lots of large floods that wiped out various peoples’ known worlds – which is what the geological record confirms.
More likely there’s a common source, though of the extant accounts the Sumerian is the obvious candidate.
Only to those who don’t understand how science works.
It’s like saying that because my Ford van can’t drive across dunes then it must be immobile.
Only to those who don’t understand how literature works.
Good grief – this is more ridiculous than any of your previous science fiction!
Try reading the text as what it is instead of forcing your allegorical fantasies on it!
No, Adam is mankind.
This isn’t as ridiculous as the above items, but it is still false: there are no historical records of a global flood.
Please stop demanding that the Holy Spirit had to coerce Moses into writing in your personal worldview!
Where does it say that?
Answer: it doesn’t. It’s a human tradition!
I considered them carefully and rejected them. You can explain in third-grade vocabulary or ALL CAPS like the president, and it wouldn’t change a thing. The flaw is in your reasoning, not your terminology.
How do you go wrong? Let me count the ways…
Setting aside the question of whether Moses wrote Genesis, the Biblical story of a global flood isn’t supported by ancient Near Eastern myths about Gilgamesh and a flood (“unrelated writings”). That was the argument made in the 19th century shortly after the 1849 discovery of the story in Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh, and it’s been debunked a thousand times since.
Think about it. The Sumerian and Babylonian stories aren’t historical narratives. They’re myths that predate the Biblical stories by a thousand years. By your definition, untrue stories. So you have things exactly backward. Can Noah’s “true” flood story be backed up by a myth about a flood? Or is another explanation more likely? The flood narrative in Gen 6-9 is a reaction to the cuneiform myths that Israelite scribes copied verbatim in scribal school. Both are myths. The difference between them is the reason given for the catastrophe: In ANE mythology, humans were disturbing the gods’ rest; in Genesis, human violence had corrupted God’s purpose for creation, and he regretted making us. Big difference.
No, it’s not “generally claimed” that someone other than the named individual wrote the gospels. Luke wasn’t an eyewitness. He explicitly says that he interviewed witnesses and written records. Both he and Matthew draw from Mark’s gospel, presumably John Mark from Acts, but neither of them claim to be eyewitnesses. John does. So only one of the four claim to be an eyewitness.
What you’re missing is the genre. The gospels are bios, or biography. The ancient placed much more weight on eyewitness testimony than we do today, which is why all the gospels go out of their way to name people. A good example of Simon of Cyrene in the gospel of Mark.
The witness for Noah’s flood is a story based on a previous myth that predated the writing of Genesis by a thousand years. No witnesses. The witness for the resurrection is named individuals written down within the living lifetime of eyewitnesses. Big difference
Government records? Rome crucified him as a common insurrectionist at the behest of the Sanhedrin. History is written by the winners. Christians were a tiny minority for several hundred years. They wrote their own history of their movement, which was passed down to us as the New Testament.
No witnesses to the time between the resurrection and the ascension? You sound like someone who’s never read the gospels. Paul records the meeting with 500 people, probably in Galilee but certainly not on the Sunday of the resurrection. Don’t you recall that the resurrected Christ kept telling his disciples to meet him in Galilee? It was basically an appointment that fits the description of Matt. 28:17, where the apostles (and possibly many more) meet him on a mountain in Galilee. Don’t forget that even after seeing him, some doubted.
500 people’s writings? You don’t have a concept of literacy in the ancient world. Reading and writing were considered separate skills. Less than 10% of people could read, and far less than that could write. Writing was taught to scribes in specialized schools. You’re arguing from incredulity, which you often do.
The story isn’t fabricated because it can’t be proved by science. A miracle violates the so-called “laws” of science. Of course the resurrection of Christ is a miracle. This is a no-brainer.
I never said creation, flood, Sodom or the Exodus weren’t miracles. But there are different classes of miracles. Some would leave physical evidence behind. The creation was a miracle, but it left behind physical evidence we can study. The same for the global Flood. Unfortunately, all the evidence we can find says it never happened.
Some Jewish writers around the time of Christ declared that the land of Israel was not flooded. The “universal” language used to describe the flood can also be found in Jeremiah’s description of the devastation from the Babylonian invasion. Hyperbole is a common literary technique in the Bible and other ancient Near Eastern writing. None of this is “Darwinian”.
A flood that devastated the entire region where Noah lived fits both the actual Hebrew description in Genesis and geological evidence. Since 1840, it’s been clear that a flood must have been local rather than regional based on geology.
Just saying it is ridiculous does not make it science fiction. There was no global flood but there are also problems with a local flood without high eustatic sea levels. Adam does made a good point that:
Thats right, the water is going to continuously drain, and:
This process can take days or even weeks, depending on the severity of the flood and the area’s geography.
Local flood waters are not going to sit for months or over a year unless its in a lake or swamp. Noah’s Arc is going to float downstream and end up in the Persian Gulf, not land in the foothills of Ararat 150 days after the rain stopped. When the flood was over, the ground was completely dry.
Local flooding in Mesopotamia is a regular occurrence but the flood of Noah only happened once. It was about 90 million years ago when the upper region of Mesopotamia (foothills of Ararat) would have been flooded at 250 m or about 800 ft above sea level today:
