Monday School: Noah and the Flood…

Yes, it’s true! It’s time once again for Monday School – “The Original Rationalist Corrective To All That Nonsense You Learned Yesterday. Accept No Inferior Substitutions!”

Today’s Lesson: Noah and The Flood

“Mary pushed up against the limits of what was possible. Mary’s mother fought vigorously against her daughter’s move away from faith. When Mary told her mother at thirteen that she didn’t believe in the Noah and the Ark story, the mother ‘fell on the floor and screamed and cried before Sunday dinner and said “I created an atheist.”‘” – Charles B. Strozier, professor of history and practicing psychoanalyst, in his book Apocalypse: On The Psychology of Fundamentalism in America, (Beacon Press, 1994), p. 63.

Of all the stories in the Bible, few seem to have captured the popular imagination and entered into our culture as deeply as that of Noah and the Flood. Millions of Americans seem to believe it to be an accurate record of an actual event. While the point of view of Mary’s mother may be an extreme one, it is hardly unique.

Does that point of view hold up under scrutiny?

Please Consider the following:

1) There is no scientific evidence for the Flood

Allegedly one of the greatest events in world history “If one adds up the ages of the antediluvian patriarchs at the time of the births of their respective sons, one finds that Noah… was born 1056 years after the creation or… about 3000 B.C. When he was six hundred years old, that is, about 2400 B.C., there came the Flood. This, according to the Bible, was a world-wide deluge, but there is no record of any such phenomenon, of course. The Egyptian civilization, for instance, was in a particularly flourishing state at this very time and was building its pyramids. Nor do the Egyptian records speak of any floods other than the annual overflow of the Nile….” – Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, p. 38.

2) The Flood story actually has a less-than-divine source

“The closest parallel to the Biblical story of the Flood, and undoubtedly the primary source of it, occurs in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh…” – Theodor H. Gaster, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament, p. 82. Although many people maintain that the Bible was inspired by God, in the case of the Flood (as in many others), it seems far more likely that its authors were merely plagiarizing another culture’s myths.

3) Perfect beings – by definition – have no need to repent or take corrective action

“And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy… both man, and beast… for it repenteth me that I have made them.” (Gen. 6:6-7) How can an all-powerful, all-knowing God possibly say that His creation of man was in effect a sin or a mistake and that man must be destroyed? How could an all-knowing God not know beforehand how His creation was going to turn out?

4) The Flood was an ungodly sloppy means

If God’s creation of man was a mistake, why didn’t God destroy only man? Why did He use a sloppy means which also destroyed innocent animal life? Why did He resort to the equivalent of all-out nuclear war when He could have conducted a simple, precise surgical bombing strike? A truly all-powerful, all-good God would have simply and efficiently made the evil He hated vanish with an instantaneous act of will. He would not have used a means as sloppy as a flood to wipe out the human containers of that evil – as well as much else besides.

5) “All men are evil – but one man is good.”

According to Gen. 6:5, “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Yet “Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations….” (Gen. 6:9) and God Himself says to Noah “thee have I seen righteous in this generation” (Gen. 7:1). Noah clearly constitutes a logical impossibility: A member of a set or general class which lacks a defining quality of that set or class. The Bible is deeply flawed not to recognize this.

6) It’s impossible for an evil race to give rise to and sustain a pure individual

Noah’s alleged status as the only just and perfect man on earth is hard to accept not just because it contradicts Gen. 6:9 but also because it violates our basic understanding of human psychology and moral development. How can one man be that much better than the society which raised him? How can a perfect man come from an imperfect family? How can such a perfect man grow up with none but imperfect role models before him? How could such a righteous man survive for some 600 years prior to the Flood in a society in which every other man’s heart held only evil?

7) God acts to save evil even as He allegedly is acting to destroy all evil

Even if we assume that Noah did in fact somehow escape the evil nature of his kind and his society and assume that God was correct to save him from the Flood, this does nothing to justify God’s telling Noah to also save his wife, his three sons, and his sons’s three wives. Apparently these seven relatives of Noah’s weren’t righteous, just, or perfect, yet an allegedly just and perfect God ordered them saved anyway. If God’s purpose was to destroy all evil, how could He permit these people to survive? If God somehow found it consistent with His perfection to tolerate or excuse their evil, why was He unable to tolerate or excuse the evil of everyone else on earth, too?

8) A loving God slaughters innocent animals?

If God thought enough to save each animal species, why didn’t He think enough of them to save each individual animal? What was the point of all the death and destruction if the world was going to be filled up again with the exact same sort of animals after the Flood as before? It seems a long, roundabout way of getting back to the point at which you started from. It certainly is not the way of a perfect or loving God.

9) Perfect beings don’t resort to imperfect arks

How could and why would an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God use an imperfect ark to save these people and animals? Why didn’t He just save them with an instantaneous act of will? Or a magic bubble wrap? Of all the wonderful ways He could have used to save them and amaze us with, why are we expected to believe that He just happened to choose one of the few ways a relatively ignorant, unimaginative ancient writer of myth might have imagined on his own – or stolen from some other culture?

Alas, that’s all the time we have for Noah and the Flood this class. Let’s pick up right where we left off next week, ok?

Feel free to leave your minds open atop your desks until then.

And also, enjoy these lovely pictures, happy Monday! 🙂