Literal belief in the flood story

[ManMachine]

A while back, I got into this argument with someone on RRS. If you believe in a literal account of the flood story, the take home is that God willingly killed children because he wanted to, and there is no other possible conclusion.

So, to start with this, if we assume there exists a god that is powerful enough to create universes out of nothing, then it's certainly plausible that there exists a god who could summon a bunch of water out of nothing, leave it on earth a while, and then magic it all away. It's not that difficult to accept once we've made the initial assumption. That being said, there are a lot of other problems with the flood myth that don't jive with the really real world:

• The mixing of fresh and salt water would have killed countless fish.
  
• Most or all terrestrial plants would have died.
  
• The herbivores wouldn't have had enough to eat when they came off the ark.
  
• The carnivores would have quickly killed all the herbivores when they got off the ark, then starved when there was no food.
  
• Every species on the planet would have had a genetic bottle neck 5,000 years ago.
  

So, if we assume God can magic up universes from nothing, and magic water up out of nothing and magic it away, then presumably he can magic up some solutions to those problems. So he uses magic to keep the fish alive. He uses magic to keep the plants alive or simply respawns a bunch of new ones later; it's all the same. He either magically sustains the carnivores and keeps them from reproducing while herbivore populations increase to where they could sustain the carnivores, or he holds them in suspended animation during this time. He also makes sure that none of the species get wiped out by a single disease until the species can become more genetically diverse.

Again, this isn't hard to accept in terms of feasibility if he's out there creating universes. We can certainly question why he'd go through such a convoluted plot to kill all the wicked people when a bunch of well-aimed lightning strikes would have done the job. We can question why he magiced all the evidence of the flood away and later based admittance criteria for heaven on belief. Still, it doesn't prove that he couldn't have done it.


The problem is: the children. The whole notion is God was mad at the wicked people, so he killed them and their kids to make things right. Now, there's no way that the children who were sufficiently young would have been wicked, so why did he kill them? Given all the hoops he had to jump through that I outline earlier, he could have totally saved them; he saved all the fish and terrestrial plants. Also rock formations. He took the time to save fragile geological rock formations, but not the kids. The take home message here is God wanted to kill the children; he had other options. Literally, according to the apologetics, an infinite number of other options.


Now, I've heard Christians respond that the other kids were going to grow up wicked, so that's why he killed them. Two problems:

1) Couldn't Noah have raised them in a moral manner while God fed them manna from heaven, or something?

2) Doesn't this completely violate the concept of free will? Whoops! There goes most of your contemporary apologetics for the problem of evil and the reason for the flood in the first place!


This myth is stupidly contrived and terrible. When people accept it as true, they make some of the most creepy, and morally bankrupt excuses for God I have ever heard.

The biblical version of the flood myth (there are a few), is not the earliest example. A recent discovery of a small, mobile-phone sized Babylonian tablet with a flood epic written on it in cuneiform pre-dates the bible version. There are versions in Sumerian mythology and it appears in other Babylonian sources mainly the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Anyway, the bottom line is it is almost certainly (as certain as we can be about historical matters), not originally a biblical myth but much earlier.

MM