Faith and Mythology: The Flood

And then there’s the flood... How do we answer someone who says “You can’t believe the Bible. Story’s like Noah’s Ark are obviously myths”? They'll give some pretty good reasons not to believe it...
  • There’s not and never has been enough water to cover the whole earth. True, but typically, whole earth means whole of the known earth, and that can and does become flooded.
  • Rain wouldn’t cause the water-level to rise so fast. True, but the Bible doesn’t say the rain came first; it might even be saying the floods rose up first.
  • You couldn’t fit two of every animal on one ship. True, but you could, and probably would, do everything you could to save breeding pairs of whatever flocks you kept.
  • What did the animals and people eat on the ark? Food; why would the story give us details?
  • There must have been rainbows before the flood. The Bible doesn’t say God made the rainbow then; it says he set it in the sky—i.e. he pointed to a rainbow and said “Look at it,” and made it a sign.
  • A good God wouldn’t kill people: But perhaps the wonder is that anyone survived—the Bible says Noah was the only one still listening to the good God’s warnings.
There are actually some surprisingly rich details in the Bible story. After the ark lands, Noah is told not to eat flesh with its blood in it—an invaluable warning not to eat floodkill. And the first record of drunkenness occurs soon after the flood story—it’s not impossible that grapes stored in barrels on the ark were the first fruit to naturally ferment instead of going off.

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