Are Secular Geologists Ready to Consider a Global Flood?

CEH ^ | April 30, 2009

[onedoug]

Without having studied it extensively I would have thought it was rather the Bosporus that flooded whereas Gibraltar is now gradually closing as the African plate rotates clockwise while moving linearly north.

One has to love the irony of tectonics as a system sometimes so terrifying and destructive, yet we couldn't live without it.

God's certainly done the work.

[Dog Gone]

A really bad flood that was basically permanent because it wiped out coastal civilizations and created a new sea, would be a very big deal to early civilization.

For them, it wasn’t local; it was global. It was their known universe.

The best explanation for the story is not rainfall, but a cataclysmic inundation of coastal communities in the Mediterranean, either at Gibralter or at the Bosporus.

Such an explanation is heresy to those who believe that animals lined up two by two or seven by seven to enter Noah’s ark. But the burden on those who believe in a truly global flood like that is to explain how that happened, why there is no evidence of it globally, or really how it makes any sense at all.

How many chapters later in Genesis were they making the Tower of Babel? If God was “cleansing the earth”, it didn’t work out so well. Care to explain why He goofed up? What was accomplished by Noah’s Flood?

It did NOT happen.

[mentor2k]

If you're saying there was "no flood", then you're going a step further than I will. Too many other ancient accounts of some type of torential flood were recorded. Homer's Iliad, the ancient Sumarian texts among other mythological writings all describe a flood event.

While I agree with you that "for them, it wasn't (a) local" flood, I disagree if you believe a flood didn't happen. And the story of Noah may very well be true. Maybe not literially, but I believe it possibly happened in some form of the way it was described in Genesis.

[Dog Gone]

I’m not sure we are disagreeing. Perhaps I used the word “local” a bit too loosely.

The Gilgamesh Epic, Noah’s Flood, and the other early writings all put a catastrophic flooding event into early history, all centered in that part of the world.

The event was not recorded by eyewitnesses, but by writers hundreds, if not thousands, of years later. To say that it wouldn’t reach the admissibility standards for evidence in a court case is an understatement.

So, it comes down for many to whether something is to believed entirely on faith, or whether physical evidence is required. I’m in the latter category.

I believe there was indeed a flood of some sort that made a huge impression on the people alive at the time, so much so that it was passed down in legendary form for centuries.