I want to go back to an issue that I find now to be crucial. The Bible is the only document founding two major religions which has an account of how the deity created the world. No other major religious document has such an account. It also has an account of how mankind was created, and it has an account (rather needlessly theologically speaking) of an account of a massive flood. If as tradition holds, and Moses is the author of the Pentateuch, why did he include these events? They could not have been his eye witness accounts because 1. in Genesis 1, no man was there to see what God did. 2. Moses wasn’t there to see how God created Adam, and 3. the flood was long before Moses lived. Some will say oral mythologies are why Moses included them. but they will also say those mythologies are fantasy.
If God inspired Moses, there really was no reason to inspire a false creation account because no other major religion has a similar creation account. Judaism and Christianity would be basically the same without Genesis 1-11. So, there are only two reason for this to be in the Bible. 1. Moses or his ancestors made it up or 2. God inspired the account and there is truth in it.
In my post Days of Proclamation I present a way to view Genesis 1 as conformable to modern science. The mere fact that there exists a way to interpret that chapter as being conformable with modern science is amazing in and of itself. Regardless of whether one likes what was done in that Days of Proclamation view, everything is documented and within the confines of a fit to science. If God is really God, why wouldn’t He inspire an account that could be read as true–other than that one doesn’t want a verifiable religion. Tipler believes this latter is the case:
" Of course, the real reason modern theologians want to keep science divorced from religion is to retain some intellectual territory forever protected from the advance of science. This can only be done if the possibility of scientific investigation of the subject matter is ruled out a priori. Theologians were badly burned in the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. Such a strategy seriously underestimates the power of science, which is continually solving problems philosophers and theologians have decreed forever beyond the ability of science to solve. " ~ Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality, (New York: Doubleday, 1994), p. 7
Maybe some are afraid that Christianity might be found to be false. If that is the case, isn’t it better to find it out than to ignore it? Christians make a huge mistake by removing Christianity and its source document from objective verifiability. Doing this means that by today’s standards, it can never actually be true! If it is true, then it gives us much assurance that we are on the right path.
In this thread I have presented a way to see Eden and the Flood as a real historical events. What is amazing to me is that what Moses wrote matches what actually happened, at least within the limits of historical science. Below is a list of things that no Neolithic man like Moses could have known. The geologic facts I have presented are all documented and generally accepted within the geological community. The only real controversial thing about what I have presented is my inclusion of the Biblical account and it is the Bible being historically true that is the problem.
1.The rivers of Eden. How did Moses chose those particular rivers. Even in his day it was known that those rivers didn’t join together. Yet they did join together back in the Messinian–in the earliest days of hominids on earth.
2.Why did Moses describe hydrology that would only make sense in a place located in a deep basin?
3.How could he have known that both the rivers and the hydrology pointed to a place where the only geologically known flood matching the description of Noah’s flood actually occurred?
4 Why did Moses chose to say a flood lasted about a year? The fact is, within geological abilities we know that the Mediterranean infilling took from a few months to two years:
" Although the flood started at low water discharges that may have lasted for up to several thousand years, our results suggest that 90 per cent of the water was transferred in a short period ranging from a few months to two years . This extremely abrupt flood may have involved peak rates of sea level rise in the Mediterranean of more than ten metres per day ." D. Garcia-Castellanos, et al, Catastrophic flood of the Mediterranean after the Messinian salinity crisis," Nature volume 462, pages 778-781
5.If the infilling of the Med took place solely by heavy rains engorging the rivers, then there would be nothing one could claim was a ‘fountain of the deep’. What caused Moses to mention fountains of the deep when something very similar to 'fountains of the deep bursting open was the cause of the catastrophic flood, the only flood ever to be able to say it can match the description of Noah’s flood? How did this Neolithic man come to put that into the account?
6.This is the only flood conceived by anyone which actually allows the ark to be deposited on the mountains (plural) of Ararat. Why did Moses pick just that site rather than say the ark was flushed into the Indian Ocean as would happen in a Mesopotamian flood in Neolithic times?
Does it scare us that Moses might have been given this information from a living God? It should. A living God is more dangerous than the one that we cage in our materialism, not letting Him out to do anything embarrassing like, do a miracle. Or create the world. Or actually oversee a flood. Or having worked for millions of years with mankind.
While I have published this view in PSCF in 1997, I haven’t pushed the view because I lacked the courage and lacked geologic data from the Eastern Mediterranean. Both that data, and my realization that the Pison actually did flow from Arabia made things fall into place this year. My views obviously have not been received well, but few new views are. Opposition comes with the territory of thinking out of the box.
That said, I was cowardly for too long a time. This recent data has stiffened my spine. Plus, I can’t figure out how Moses came to write the things he did. These are things which he could only have known by inspiration.
Some no doubt will claim I am ‘reading things into geology’. Didn’t we read the experiments into quantum theory, into General Relativity? This is how science works. I didn’t make up the collapse of the dam at Gibraltar which sure fits the description of fountains of the deep. I didn’t write the Bible either. I didn’t read into the geology a flood that lasts between a few months and 2 years (centroid about a year), Other geologists said that is how long it lasted. I didn’t write the Bible to make it say 1 year for the flood. I didn’t chose the rivers. I didn’t write the description of Eden which seems to match the lay of the land 5.3 myr ago. I didn’t invent artesian flow which could easily match the mists. No, I am not reading things into geology or the Bible, I am noting only that there is an incredible match between the words of the Bible and the Mediterranean 5.3 myr ago.