(November 27, 2014 at 5:48 pm)Rhythm Wrote: I have an alternative hypothesis - it's just a story. Not embellishment, not mythicized tragedy, just a story. As an example, what do you think the size of the actual Death Star was, upon which the story was based?That's the perfect example, IMO. Our myths and legends are always so much larger than life. Mankind makes bombs that can level entire cities, but in his stories he creates laser beams that can annihilate an entire planet. In the real world men can become strong enough to bench press half-a-ton. In our stories they are strong enough to lift buildings. And so on. Our most enduring legends are larger-than-life.
So if a civilization has seen its share of regional flooding, is it any surprise that one of its most popular cultural tales is of a flood that engulfed the entire planet? Or that such tales would be common among ancient societies? Your most successful ones were likely to be the ones that built their villages and cities near rivers, after all.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould