RE: The Noachian Flood
January 6, 2013 at 11:00 am
(This post was last modified: January 6, 2013 at 11:26 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Only (as you mentioned in your post) if we are to make vast provisions for embellishment. We have to be very, very lenient in allowing it to be a candidate. If we're going to be so lenient (in allowing for bullshit) then we really don't need anything like the proposed black sea event at all (which, even going by the link provided and ignoring any dispute involved about whether or not it actually occurred as an event...it doesn't seem to have been very catastrophic at all).
Since I mentioned dragons earlier, I'll elaborate on that example and how it applies. It's enchanting to imagine that our ancestors may have found dinosaur fossils and then begin to create stories about dragons. But, for a moment, ask yourself a few questions. What about finding a thigh bone (complete fossils are rare as hell even when looking for them...but even if we assumed a complete fossil the questions still apply) would lead someone to the conclusion that they had found a magical, flying, fire-breathing, gold hoarding, maiden stealing - dragon? Why would they imagine a dragon at all, as opposed to some creature they were already familiar with writ large? To be blunt, it's entirely likely that they already had dragon stories even if they did find dinosaur bones and attribute them to the tales.
Now, if we assume in the case of the dragon that they merely saw the fossil and thought to themselves "big reptile" and the rest is embellishment, it's just as compelling to propose that they saw a little sidewalk lizard and starting spinning yarns. All of this completely ignores the human ability to manufacture fiction whole-cloth mind you. We d have a talent for weaving tales about things that we have demonstrably never experienced (Dracula isn't a documentary, Tolkien never encountered an orc, L. Ron Hubbard never met any galactic overlords). When we account for this it becomes difficult to see why we even need to propose a cataclysmic event in explaining -stories- about cataclysmic events (and again, the black sea event doesn't seem like a sudden catastrophe), in the same way that it becomes difficult to see why we need a fossil and not just a lizard to account for dragons (if we need anything at all). Now, I might be biased (because I love a good story) but I'm entirely comfortable with crediting fiction to an author if the event described has no grounds in the world beyond the authors mind. To me, lizards ergo dragon stories, or floods ergo deluge cheapens the accomplishment of the people who spun the yarn. But, let's assume that for whatever (only slightly demeaning reason) that the people who put this little gem together were incapable of broad fiction, that they required some singular event, or event of a particular scale, to begin telling the tale.
If we're running with it, there are some questions to be asked. Firstly, even if this wasn't a sudden catastrophe, no massive wall of water sweeping the area...it still would have been impressive (and even if it were it still wouldn't match the description of the deluge, it would have been much slower). Why the need for embellishment? Particularly, whats all this about a storm? The storm described, of course- even if it only occurred over the black sea area- would have destroyed a very large portion of the earth. I'm not talking about flooded mind you- destroyed. Destroyed as in molten earth and acid rain (not the pansy ass shit we think of, stone dissolving flesh melting acid rain). Mass extinction, a smoldering crater to this very day - still poisoning our atmosphere and any connected waterways- and still radiating destruction. I mention this to emphasize the type of embellishment we're actually talking about (not that they would have realized that all this would have happened, granted). If you have a story about how "the world" was swallowed by water, and you have a mind to tell it like it was a punishment, and "the world" was swallowed by water......there's hardly a need to fancy up the tale. Secondly (but still very closely related to the question above really), even if we are embellishing the tale, why is it embellished in such a manner? Why don't we make our wall of water bigger? It's advance more sudden, what's all this about mountains being covered (there isn't anything even approaching a mountain in the area proposed for a flooding event - which is just the coastal shelf).....the mountains (or more accurately the elevation at the coast......would have been precisely what held the waters back and prevented it from seeking it's own level (turning it into a non-event in any case)? Why the embellishments about animals and boats, and particularly whats all this about the sequence of re-population?
Now, and clearly we can have different opinions here, the embellishments required to present us with the narrative we have are so great as to make the two events entirely dissimilar to each other. Essentially, we're saying floods happen, so floods are the source of the myth, but given the gulf between this particular event and the narrative I can't see why we would choose this one over any other. Except, perhaps, the desire to feel as though people couldn't have gotten something entirely wrong, that all narratives must have some explanation. To me it seems on the one hand to be affording entirely too much undeserved credibility to the deluge narrative, and entirely too little recognition to human talent for fiction. By invoking embellishment (but perhaps not realizing how much embellishment we're talking about in truth) we allow for positively anything, but why? We don't seem to be similarly interested in allowing the creation narratives of various religions (or cataclysm narratives of various religions) to be highly embellished tales -with a tasty kernel of truth at the center-. Perhaps it would have been simpler (and it obviously would have been much more brief) to explain that my opinion of the deluge narrative is simply one which applies Occams Razor. Human ability to write fiction accounts for deluge narratives in their entirety - nothing else need be proposed (even if we could propose a number of things). Even when we add those other things we still tip our hats to fiction (in a big way). I'm simply comfortable proposing something entirely more economical that hardly needs any bending or allowances to be made in the arguing for it.
(as a minor but revealing aside, we also have to acknowledge that cultures from all over the world, people who would, in no way, have witnessed any event in the area of the black sea and likely never would have even heard of it also have deluge myths. Each of them, very sparingly described, are narratives of storm gods who can open the floodgates of the world, a belief that requires no single flood to support it or develop a narrative from it in any case - even desert tribes have these narratives)
Since I mentioned dragons earlier, I'll elaborate on that example and how it applies. It's enchanting to imagine that our ancestors may have found dinosaur fossils and then begin to create stories about dragons. But, for a moment, ask yourself a few questions. What about finding a thigh bone (complete fossils are rare as hell even when looking for them...but even if we assumed a complete fossil the questions still apply) would lead someone to the conclusion that they had found a magical, flying, fire-breathing, gold hoarding, maiden stealing - dragon? Why would they imagine a dragon at all, as opposed to some creature they were already familiar with writ large? To be blunt, it's entirely likely that they already had dragon stories even if they did find dinosaur bones and attribute them to the tales.
Now, if we assume in the case of the dragon that they merely saw the fossil and thought to themselves "big reptile" and the rest is embellishment, it's just as compelling to propose that they saw a little sidewalk lizard and starting spinning yarns. All of this completely ignores the human ability to manufacture fiction whole-cloth mind you. We d have a talent for weaving tales about things that we have demonstrably never experienced (Dracula isn't a documentary, Tolkien never encountered an orc, L. Ron Hubbard never met any galactic overlords). When we account for this it becomes difficult to see why we even need to propose a cataclysmic event in explaining -stories- about cataclysmic events (and again, the black sea event doesn't seem like a sudden catastrophe), in the same way that it becomes difficult to see why we need a fossil and not just a lizard to account for dragons (if we need anything at all). Now, I might be biased (because I love a good story) but I'm entirely comfortable with crediting fiction to an author if the event described has no grounds in the world beyond the authors mind. To me, lizards ergo dragon stories, or floods ergo deluge cheapens the accomplishment of the people who spun the yarn. But, let's assume that for whatever (only slightly demeaning reason) that the people who put this little gem together were incapable of broad fiction, that they required some singular event, or event of a particular scale, to begin telling the tale.
If we're running with it, there are some questions to be asked. Firstly, even if this wasn't a sudden catastrophe, no massive wall of water sweeping the area...it still would have been impressive (and even if it were it still wouldn't match the description of the deluge, it would have been much slower). Why the need for embellishment? Particularly, whats all this about a storm? The storm described, of course- even if it only occurred over the black sea area- would have destroyed a very large portion of the earth. I'm not talking about flooded mind you- destroyed. Destroyed as in molten earth and acid rain (not the pansy ass shit we think of, stone dissolving flesh melting acid rain). Mass extinction, a smoldering crater to this very day - still poisoning our atmosphere and any connected waterways- and still radiating destruction. I mention this to emphasize the type of embellishment we're actually talking about (not that they would have realized that all this would have happened, granted). If you have a story about how "the world" was swallowed by water, and you have a mind to tell it like it was a punishment, and "the world" was swallowed by water......there's hardly a need to fancy up the tale. Secondly (but still very closely related to the question above really), even if we are embellishing the tale, why is it embellished in such a manner? Why don't we make our wall of water bigger? It's advance more sudden, what's all this about mountains being covered (there isn't anything even approaching a mountain in the area proposed for a flooding event - which is just the coastal shelf).....the mountains (or more accurately the elevation at the coast......would have been precisely what held the waters back and prevented it from seeking it's own level (turning it into a non-event in any case)? Why the embellishments about animals and boats, and particularly whats all this about the sequence of re-population?
Now, and clearly we can have different opinions here, the embellishments required to present us with the narrative we have are so great as to make the two events entirely dissimilar to each other. Essentially, we're saying floods happen, so floods are the source of the myth, but given the gulf between this particular event and the narrative I can't see why we would choose this one over any other. Except, perhaps, the desire to feel as though people couldn't have gotten something entirely wrong, that all narratives must have some explanation. To me it seems on the one hand to be affording entirely too much undeserved credibility to the deluge narrative, and entirely too little recognition to human talent for fiction. By invoking embellishment (but perhaps not realizing how much embellishment we're talking about in truth) we allow for positively anything, but why? We don't seem to be similarly interested in allowing the creation narratives of various religions (or cataclysm narratives of various religions) to be highly embellished tales -with a tasty kernel of truth at the center-. Perhaps it would have been simpler (and it obviously would have been much more brief) to explain that my opinion of the deluge narrative is simply one which applies Occams Razor. Human ability to write fiction accounts for deluge narratives in their entirety - nothing else need be proposed (even if we could propose a number of things). Even when we add those other things we still tip our hats to fiction (in a big way). I'm simply comfortable proposing something entirely more economical that hardly needs any bending or allowances to be made in the arguing for it.
(as a minor but revealing aside, we also have to acknowledge that cultures from all over the world, people who would, in no way, have witnessed any event in the area of the black sea and likely never would have even heard of it also have deluge myths. Each of them, very sparingly described, are narratives of storm gods who can open the floodgates of the world, a belief that requires no single flood to support it or develop a narrative from it in any case - even desert tribes have these narratives)
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