My theory about the Flood

Faith & Science Conversation
83

You are right regarding the global population around 3’000 BCE.
The guestimate of 7,000,000 I have given is that for 4’000 BCE according to Historical Estimates of World Population. I correct the data in this posting and coming ones[quote=“Jonathan_Burke, post:67, topic:35366”]

  1. The people living far away were capable of sinning insofar as they were morally aware. They had a sense of right and wrong, and they formed societies in which morality was prescribed. However, they were unenlightened as to God’s law, so sin was not imputed to them. They were not responsible to the law of God.

  2. Consequently they had no need of being “transformed by God into human persons capable of sinning”. They were already human persons capable of sinning.
    [/quote]

By ‘sin’ I mean: “An immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law.”
Therefore, if a living being “is not responsible to the law of God”, it cannot be guilty of sin.
Nonetheless to avoid “discussing about words” in the following I reformulate my statements taking account of the meanings you use in order to make clear to which thing each term we use is applied.

It seems to me that we both agree in the following three Premises A-C:

A:
About 100,000 humans living around Noah in Sumer were responsible to the law of God and, because of their sins against this law, became destroyed by the Flood, except Noah and his family.

B:
About 14,000,000 humans living far away from Noah outside Mesopotamia and spread all over the world were not responsible to the law of God and consequently were incapable of sinning against it; all of them remained untouched together with all non-human animals living in this area.

C:
After the Flood there were human beings who were responsible to the law of God, but biologically were not descended from the 8 in the Ark.

In case you don’t agree to Premises A-C above please tell me where you disagree, so that we reach common ground before continuing discussing.

From the Premises A-C I derive the following

Conclusion 1:
After the Flood God enlightened the 14,000,000 humans living outside Mesopotamia and they became responsible to the law of God and capable of sinning against this law.

Additionally, in agreement with Biologos What we Believe 3 and 4 I come to:

Conclusion 2:
All human beings living on earth after the Flood till today are in need of Salvation and can be saved and reconciled with God by the Grace of Jesus Christ.

It seems me important to know whether you agree or not to Conclusions 1 and 2 before we proceed to discuss the question of the Nephilim and other related topics.

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84

Sorry it has taken me so long to reply; I haven’t been around the Forum for the past few days, but let me try to respond now!

Wow, this is an extremely strange position to wind up.

I would say that just because the borders of ‘species’ are arbitrary, that doesn’t mean that the concept isn’t biologically valid or real. I certainly would never say that humans were the first proper species.

When I was looking up dinosaurs, many species definitions consisted of ‘any animal more closely related to this than that.’ Although the middle point you get from this definition is arbitrary, it does make an effective dividing line and you can clearly group members of a species together.

Wait, what? I’m not following this leap of logic in the least. I’m a pantheist; it means that God is indivisible from the growth of Creation. I agree with those members of Biologos who assert that God was providentially involved in all of Creation; it is therefore impossible to separate out details like irreducible complexity, point to them, and say, ‘There can be no natural explanation for this, therefore it must have been God,’ as the Intelligent Design movement is fond of doing.

Thanks for pointing this out! I can better see where you are coming from now. So Adam was not a person, in your thinking, until God told him not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (until there was a Law to follow)?

It’s true that I don’t really see what the point of it would be. I’m far too great a procrastinator already: it seems silly to believe that I will be a better person with eternity in front of me than I am with only 90 years or so.

I haven’t yet caught up on the rest of this thread, there may be more to say once I have!

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It sure is! Jerry Coyne has pointed out that animals usually have no problem finding members of their own species to mate with.

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@AntoineSuarez

You don’t need to dismiss the concept of Species to establish that “Man” as described by Genesis was the first individual recognized by God to have Moral Agency (either because he gave it to him, or he arranged evolution to give it to him).

When you dismiss Species for no particularly good reason, you come off as flaky. Just leave the Species issue alone and focus on the moment Moral Agency hits our favorite hominid pals.

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I don’t agree with that. The people who were previously unenlightened, remained unenlightened until they met other people who were enlightened and who told them about God’s laws.

I agree with that.

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88

A post was split to a new topic: Intelligent Design makes more sense than BioLogos

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There was an article a while back in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith about the possibility of Noah’s Arc being near Dogubayazit, Turkey. Lorence G. Collins in the article explains that the “petrified wood” walls of the arc is actually plain basalt formations and other “evidence” for the Arc’s position were not evidence at all (These other pieces of credence were so-called iron washers, rivets, and brackets were also a natural geologic formation). Needless to say, it would be pretty cool to find the remains of such a structure, but God seems to have systematically removed objects and places such as The Arc of the Covenant and Jesus’s Tomb, probably because people would start to worship the things rather than the Creator. Unfortunately, this actually can become a problem, such as when Christians begin to worship the word of God, the Bible, rather than God himself. This is the problem when people start getting too exited about once again having “evidence” for God or his actions when what God asks for is faith in him.

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Actually I think it’s simpler than that. One of the first things you’d be interested in doing in a post-flood world is building shelter and maybe some animal pens to keep livestock. Now where to find the wood you’d need…

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92

I think the Arc of the Covenant is still where it has always been.

_arc of the covenant.jpg1920×1200 1.42 MB

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God’s promises reverberate throughout his creation. Without a doubt.

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Yes. But actually I was making a rather sad pun on the word “arc”. In Genesis, the rainbow is the “arc of the covenant”.

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Thanks Jon. Since you don’t question Premise B I assume you agree to it as well:

On this basis I argue:
Since the 14,000,000 humans living outside Mesopotamia were incapable of sinning against the law of God, they could not be in the stage of “need of salvation”.

Nonetheless (according to Conclusion 2) after the Flood they are in “need of salvation”.

From this follows that after the Flood the 14,000,000 have been endowed by God with moral responsibility toward His law and became capable of sinning against God. And this means that God made them to human beings sharing the same stage of “need of salvation” as the 8 in Noah’s container.

By contrast, all the non-human animals living outside Mesopotamia and also those in Noah’s container remained as they were before the Flood.

Taking account of this we can further conclude that:

Since 2 Peter 2:5 speaks from the perspective of Salvation, in this Epistle the term “ancient world” refers to the region before the Flood where those in need of salvation lived, and from these only Noah and his family were saved from the waters.

Since all living beings outside Mesopotamia remained as untouched as those in Noah’s container it is fitting to consider the “Ark” as assembled by Noah’s container and all the area outside Mesopotamia (i.e.: almost the whole planet, from our perspective today).

At the end of the Flood from this “Ark” came out all animal species living today in the earth and a new humanity, which from now on are governed by the principles God proclaims in Genesis 9: 3-11.

In my view an important lesson of this interesting debate is that “global” and “local” are bad categories to describe the antediluvian world from the perspective of Salvation, that is, the perspective of the inspired authors in the Bible and specially of 2 Peter 2:5.

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:grinning: Ten forum points to Jonathan!

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97

Many thanks Christy for your Reference to Alexander Saleh’s Presentation: It would be nice if Alexander himself could participate to our debate.

You yourself state:

It seems as if you claim that “accountability to human laws” is unrelated to “accountability to God’s law”, but I am not sure whether I understand well what you mean. In any case it may be useful to discuss more in detail the relationship between these two kinds of “accountabilities”. To this aim consider the following cases:

  • Human laws that forbid killing an innocent person:
    Is “moral reasoning and behavior” in this context unrelated to “the image of God”?

  • Atheist dictators who have killed millions of people and died without being condemned for their crimes here on earth:
    Should we consider that they are not accountable to God’s law and will escape Judgement in the afterlife?

  • Terrorists who kill people believing they fulfill a “Commandment of God”.
    Are they only accountable to human laws but not to God’s law?

And the other way around:

  • Unbelievers who act honestly according to human laws:
    Should we conclude that they will not be rewarded by God in the afterlife?

I would be thankful if you could clarify your position in these respects.

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Thanks to Indiana Jones.

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I think accountability to human laws is relative since human laws are determined by community consensus. We are accountable to the human laws/moral standards established by our particular human community. Accountability to God depends on God establishing law and relationship and requiring accountability.

I don’t think sin exists apart from God’s revelation of his law/will to humanity. Sin is different than immorality. I can do something that is considered immoral by people in one human cultural context that would be considered perfectly acceptable or even noble in another human cultural context. Whether or not this act is sinful depends on what God reveals about his intentions for humanity and their obedience.

I would say yes. I think we are all created to be image bearers and I think of that as being ambassadors of God and participants in his mission on earth and in history. I don’t think most humans are faithful in this task, or even aware of what this calling entails. So I would hesitate to say every human bears the image of God. (Unless I were just accommodating the typical usage of the phrase which basically means every person has dignity and intrinsic value.) I would say every human is called to bear the image of God.

Every person is accountable to God’s law because it has already been revealed. (Determining when exactly in history this accountability began frankly isn’t interesting to me. I don’t see how knowing would change anything about how we live out our faith in the here and now.) How this accountability will play out at final judgment, I don’t pretend to understand. I believe the righteous will be vindicated and God’s perfect justice will be carried out.

Same as above.

I believe that no one is saved apart from recognizing Jesus as Lord. I also believe God abounds in love and kindness and constantly extends grace to his creation. I don’t know how God will deal with good people (by human standards) who have either never heard of Jesus or who have not responded to him in faith in their lives on earth.

100

Christy, I warmly thank you for these valuable thoughts!

Here you seem to support (like me) Romans 2:14-15: “The requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness”.

On the other hand the foundation of human law is the Golden Rule: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow”. And this is the core of God’s law as well, Moses received on Mount Sinai: “For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’.“ (Galatians 5:14). Trespassing just human laws means sinning against God’s law in the end (1 Peter 2:13-14).

The same is very much confirmed by archeological evidence like the Code of Hammurabi where in a carved relief this Sumerian King is represented receiving the law from the seated Shamash, the Babylonian god of justice: A clear symbol for the divine origin of human law.

This is the reason why I consider the first vestiges revealing the sense of law (for instance Shuruppak and Ebla tablets about 2500 BC) as signs that at this time God had revealed His law to humans, and these became capable of sinning.

You are right when you claim:

Nonetheless you also claim to know that God’s law “has already been revealed”. Thereby you acknowledge that you have empirical evidence of this revelation. And I presume you will agree that this evidence existed already at the time of Jesus Christ and at the time of Moses. Did the DNA of the Apostles or of the Israelites changed when they received the revelation by Jesus Christ or Moses? Certainly NO. Did their minds change? YES. So you (like me) are assuming that God acts without engineering changes in the DNA but enlightening spiritually our minds and endowing us with sense of law and responsibility to Him.

Accordingly it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether at the time of the Flood all Homo sapiens existing in the earth had or not the sense of law written in their hearts. I think this question should be interesting to everyone who believes “the Bible is the inspired and authoritative word of God” [BioLogos, what we believe,1.]

I dare to insist: If you place the Flood around 3000 BC, then we have the following evidence:

  • Vestiges clearly revealing sense of law appear worldwide only after this time.

  • Nonetheless within Mesopotamia we find Cuneiform, the script used to write the first contracts and codes of law.

So it is reasonable to conclude that the about 100,000 human beings living in Sumer around Noah had sense of law, were capable of sinning, and were in need of salvation. By contrast, only at the end of the Flood God endowed the 14,000,000 humans living outside Mesopotamia with sense of law, and then they became capable of sinning and in need of salvation.

This conclusion fits well to the fact that Genesis 9:5-6 is the first time when inspired Scripture refers to the “image of God” as the reason for “the condemnation of homicide” (“the foundation of human law”!).

Furthermore (as I have argued in a previous posting) this conclusion allows us to interpret 2 Peter 2:5 fittingly from the perspective of Salvation.

This conclusion shows as well that Noah’s “Ark” was in fact much bigger than the YEC’s one at Kentucky, and really contained practically all animal species living today on earth. Interpreting Genesis with help of Evolution goes far beyond what YECs could ever dream, and they could use their money and their admirable marketing capabilities to perform more sustainable apologetics.

A final remark, my theory is testable:

If you find a stele like that of Hammurabi outside Mesopotamia long before 3000 BC I would be wrong, and my theory should be corrected.

But if I am right, then we have amazing evidence that evolutionary science is helping us to understand the Bible, and thereby science itself proves the Bible to be inspired Word of God which holds for all times.

101

We know that humans had social laws before they were recorded.

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102

Not really. I have the Scriptures, so for me and everyone alive now (and the ruthless dictators of the hypothetical you posed) it has already been revealed. I don’t claim to know when in history God revealed himself to humanity or if the ancestors of the Semitic peoples were the first and/or only ancient cultural group to whom God reached out and established relationship. It is just the relationship whose history I count a part of my own.

Maybe partially. But, I don’t think receiving God’s revelation is a function of capacity or sense, natural or God-given. I think it is a function of election. God chose to reveal himself to humanity (through certain representatives perhaps) and establish a relationship. I think of it in relational and volitional terms (offering/accepting, commanding/obeying), calling/responding, not in terms of intellectual or spiritual enlightenment.

Personally, I think the flood is a narrative intended to teach us theology about judgment, repentance, salvation, and grace. I don’t really care when and if a flood actually happened in history or what it’s scope was. I don’t trouble my little head about all those details. :slight_smile:

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Interestingly enough recorded history begins around 3500 BCE. Any record of vestiges of a sense of law wouldn’t exist before then. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence as some like to say.

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