In 1922, archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his team began a dig. The site was a huge mound of rubble; the remains of the Biblical city of Ur. Like many old cities, Ur consisted of buildings built on top of the remains of older buildings. By digging trenches down through these layers in different places, Woolley hoped to gain insight into 6000 years of continual habitation.
What they found over the years exceeded all expectations. Not only did they find a treasure of artefacts that helped us understand how these ancient people lived, but they found the earliest inhabitants actually predated the Sumerians, taking us back farther than anyone imagined.
Then Woolley and his team found something else that caught everyone by surprise.
Modern science, as we recognize it today, emerged during a time when Catholicism was the predominant religion of the "civilized" world. As the church of Rome grew in power and wealth, She was able to pay for scientific and academic exploration in ways few others could. The world view of the time was that the Earth was only about 6000 years old, and people assumed they already knew and understood a great deal about the past because of the historical events recorded in the Bible. No one really thought to question these assumptions. So as early geologists saw rocks in places they didn't belong, or found huge beds of fossilized bone, and studied layers in the earth, they generally accepted these as evidence of catastrophic events such as Noah's Flood.
In time, however, it became increasingly clear that these easy answers couldn't explain what was being found. As is typical of academia, new notions for things like continental drift or glaciations were met with great resistance. When the evidence eventually mounted to the point that it could no longer be denied, ignored or mocked away, there was another typical response; in accepting the new interpretations of evidence, there was a backlash against all previous conclusions. Once these new geological ideas were accepted, anything that once was attributed to Biblical interpretation was now summarily rejected as being nothing more than religious nonsense.
Unfortunately, this meant that perfectly correct observations were rejected with the wrong ones. As the new dogma replaced the old, observations and evidence that seemed to corroborate the old dogma were rejected as thoroughly as evidence for the new dogma had been for so many years.
Enter Woolley's discovery.
Having dug for many years through layers of Sumerian culture, then finding an even older period Woolley named the "al-'Ubaid period," Woolley and his team reached a layer of clay and silt. Usually, this would be seen as evidence that they'd gone back as far as they could; that they had already reached the very first group of people that lived in this region. His workers thought they had reached the end of the dig. Woolley, however, decided to keep going.
Much to everyone's shock, after digging through eight feet of water-laid sediment, they found more remains of people living at this site, with pottery matching the al-'Ulbaid pottery found above the layer of sediment.
The sediment layer turned out to extend not to not only the depth of eight feet (10 in some areas), but covered and area some 400x100 miles.
What Woolley had found was physical evidence of a colossal flood; a flood he believed to be the flood described in the Bible.
The sediment layer, consisting of billions of tonnes of material that had clearly been laid down in a single, rapid event, was dated to about 3000 BC. Sumerian clay tablets dating back to 2000 BC contain records of a great flood. Not only was this evidence of a flood greater than anything previously known, but it was witnessed and recorded as history by humans.
The resistance to evidence confirming the existence of a single flood of colossal proportions continues. Few are willing to publish such evidence, nor entertain it in discussions. Of the few that do, they often come with disclaimers or attempts to explain away the evidence into something more acceptable to the current dogma. Of course, the few places that are willing to publish this evidence as what looks to be a global event (especially online) are those that tend to be completely rejected by opponents for being religious in some way. A convenient way to reject evidence one doesn't want to entertain. Of course, believers in the Biblical account of the flood don't agree on all the details, either. This is often used by opponents as proof that the Biblical account must be false, though why this should be so escapes me. Why does the fact that people disagree on how something happened have to mean it didn't happen at all?
As I've mentioned in Part One of this discussion, I am not a Bible Literalist. I am not a Young Earth Creationist, either, however in my more recent studies about radiometric dating and its challenges, I've come to the conclusion that we don't actually have any idea how old the earth is, and that it may be far younger than the 4.5 billion years currently stated (to be discussed another time, but for now I'd recommend reading Shattering the Myths of Darwinism by Richard Milton as a backgrounder). So whether someone is arguing for the Biblical flood from a literal interpretation, or against it based on old earth theory, I'm going to have arguments against both points of view. Overall, though, I work with what we have, knowing that any conclusions currently accepted by either side can be overturned at any time with new evidence.
I'll leave you to read the links I've added above and encourage you to explore elsewhere to draw your own conclusions about the geological evidence of a flood. For now, I'll explore a few thoughts I've encountered and entertained over the years.
The first major discussion I had about the Biblical flood goes back some twenty years (so any resources I had back then are pretty much gone). The company I worked for was owned by a couple of guys who happened to also be dedicated Christians - they did much to counter my own jaded views about Christianity, just by their high level of honesty and integrity. For a time, they hired a young man from their church who was studying to become a pastor. This led to some very interesting discussions while we worked together. At one point, he told me of a fellow student who was working on a scale model of the ark. Though the Bible gives some details about how the ark was to be built that are quite precise, in the end, we don't actually know much about it. Even the measurements that are given are a problem. A cubit, for example, is supposed to be the distance from the tips of the fingers to the end of the elbow. Well, whose arm are we measuring? As such, I've seen people claim the ark to be anywhere from 450 - 600 feet long. We don't actually know. There is a group in the US working on building a full size replica, however, and I think it will be interesting to see what they come up with.
Many drawings of the ark, especially in children's books, show the ark as a big boat with a deck and a house-like roofed area. Not a particularly useful design for the conditions the ark was supposed to be made for, nor one that really matches the Biblical description, which seems like it would have looked a bit more like a football. The student working on a scale model I was told about felt it was a design meant to roll over completely and be able right itself, which makes perfect sense (as an aside, some of Canada's old destroyers were designed to do the same, though they would lose their guns in the process, allowing them to stay out in weather that would force other ships to return to port. Yes, it worked). His view was that it was more like a modern submarine in design. Early artistic renderings of the ark showed something more saucer shaped, as if one elongated plate were inverted on top of another.
As my old co-worker and I talked about the flood mythology, he mentioned something that struck me, more because I just happened to have read a paper perhaps a week earlier that corroborated his comment. His assertion was that, prior to the flood, there was no rain. The atmosphere itself was very humid. Water was acquired either from lakes and rivers, or from the heavy dew left behind in the mornings. The paper I had read had described an early earth that had very warm climate, no rain, and an atmosphere saturated with humidity until finally, triggered by volcanic and seismic events, the atmosphere lost its moisture in what would have been a the world's most massive rainstorm ever. Likewise, large reservoirs of water trapped underground were breeched, adding to the amount of water from the atmosphere. The main difference was that the paper I read placed the date of this event to perhaps millions of years ago, though the length of time was based on the assumption of the earth being over 2 billion years old (an age that has had a couple of billion years added to it since then).
This brought up a few notions about what the geological, climatic and atmospheric conditions of the earth was during the days of Noah. Among the claims made against the Bible is the extremely long life spans recorded. How could people really live for hundreds of years? In truth, our bodies are essentially replaced every 7 - 9 years or so (with the exception of certain cells, such as some of those in the brain), as our cells regenerate themselves. Perhaps the real question should be, with our cells continually replacing themselves, why do we age so quickly? Or at all? With a heavily saturated atmosphere to protect us, combined with a warm climate and geological stability, it may indeed be possible for human life spans to be far longer than after those conditions are lost, though perhaps not as long as claimed (after all, the average person for much of human history didn't really keep track of years and often had no idea how old they really were; circumstances that are still true in some modern day cultures. My own mother didn't discover her true age until she was in her 30's - it was quite a shock for her to discover she was actually older than she'd believed).
This notion brings up an interesting scenario. Imagine living in a world where rain doesn't exist. You are nowhere near any large, open bodies of water. Then there's this weird old man who tells you that, sometime soon (with "soon" being a relative statement - it is supposed to have taken Noah 120 years to build the ark), water is going to fall from the sky and the whole world will be covered with so much water, it would cover the mountains. Then he starts building this giant boat that doesn't look like any boat you've ever heard of - on dry land. No wonder the Bible describes people mocking Noah and his family. Who wouldn't?
Though the typical story of Noah's flood describes 40 days and nights of rain, there was more to it than that. Among the statements made to claim impossibility for a global flood is that there's no way the mountains could be covered - especially not by the 15 cubits described. This presumes the mountains were as high as they are now, or even close to what they are now. Uniformitarianism demands that the rise of mountains be a slow and steady thing, a few inches a year, as observed today. Yet some of those highest mountains contain deep layers of sedimentary rock and marine fossils at their very peaks in quantities uniformitarian theory cannot explain away, as well as the bone beds found all over the world, and various areas that show deep layers of sedimentation that could only have occurred in short periods of time, among other geological finds that confound our abilities to explain. Evidence abounds that our earth has gone through periods of inactivity in between periods of cataclysmic changes, lurching back and forth between calm and chaos. Pillow lava (formed underwater), for example, on mountainsides suggest significant upheaval. It appears that more than flooding happened, but massive underwater volcanoes and earthquakes as well. One thing's for sure; the world would have changed utterly and completely once the survivors left the ark a year after the rains.
Interestingly, the one flood myth I wrote about in Part One that didn't involve a boat involved our survivors hiding out in a cave - and that as the waters rose, so did the mountain top.
Among the other problems with the Biblical story is the supposed contradiction of just how many animals Noah took along. I'm not sure the two "versions" are contradictions, so much as they are one providing more detailed information than the other. Other flood myths give even less information, or don't include having animals and seeds at all. In the Biblical version, Noah was to bring along mated pairs of all "unclean" animals, with 7 mated pairs of "clean" animals. "Clean" animals were those with cloven hooves and chewed a cud - ruminants that tended to live in very large herds, for the most part. For birds, these were pretty much any bird that wasn't a bird of prey or scavenger. How many pairs would that be in total? Who knows? They certainly wouldn't need to bring, for example, one pair of every dog breed, just one pair of dogs. We don't even know how many different types of animals there were at the time; certainly not the same number we have today, as it's a number that is constantly changing. One of the points made to attack the Biblical story is the concern with genetic diversity. A curious objection, in my view, since the people making it tend to be Darwinists. Which means that they believe all life on earth, plant and animal, on land, underwater and in the air, are descended from a single cell that sprung up spontaneously, fully capable of reproducing itself, and managing to survive long enough to do so. If a single cell can lead to the genetic diversity of all living things on earth, why is it so difficult to believe complex creatures can to do the same?
Another objection I've heard made against the Biblical version of the ark is that it would be impossible for Noah to know enough about engineering and shipbuilding to build a vessel to withstand flood conditions. Curiously, I only hear this argument made against Noah's ark, not against other flood myths. A Native American version I recall involved people tying a bunch of canoes together, enough for people (an entire village's worth), animals and seeds, and using hides as a roof. Hardly a combination one would expect to withstand the torrents of a global flood.
No matter.
The easiest and most flippant answer to this objection would be that Noah didn't need to know - he had God telling him how to build the art. Personally, I'm not fond of that answer. Part of my reasoning against both the objection and the flippant answer is that they both presume ancient humans were somehow less intelligent or capable than we are today. What hubris! Why wouldn't Noah be able to figure out how to build such a structure? After all, these were the people who developed civilization; they are the ones who figured out how to domesticate animals, develop agriculture and written languages. They were the ones who figured out how to take indigestible things like grain and process them into a valuable food source. They figured out what foods were safe to eat, what herbs could be used as medicines (some of which are the basis for our pharmaceuticals today), and how to prepare and store food for future use. These are the people who developed tools and construction techniques, art and culture, law and tradition. How many modern structures do you think will still be around for a millennia or two, like the Roman aqueducts, or the Egyptian and Mayan temples and pyramids? Our ancient ancestors were just as intelligent, creative and capable as we are today. Why couldn't Noah or his contemporaries be engineers? These are the people who invented engineering.
Looking at all the different flood myths, it seems to me that there must be something real behind them. Looking at the geological finds, it seems to me that there is reason to believe there was a flood of epic proportions that is recorded in sediments and boneyards around the world. The writers of these myths could only write about what they knew; I don't think they'd be so stupid as to mistake small, regional floods for a global one when they so consistently refer to floodwaters deep enough to cover mountains and express the need to save seeds and animals for the future. I also see no reason to wonder that Noah and his descendants might write about being the only surviving humans, while some other group of survivors on another continent records the same belief; why would they know about each other? Why would they need to?
In the end, it's doubtful we'll ever know the full nature of the Biblical flood or the existence of Noah and his family. The existence of the ark itself might be proven, perhaps. We know there's worldwide evidence of an epic flood, corroborated by flood myths shared by some 250 cultures around the world that show this flood happened within human history.
To dismiss all this over petty details seems silly enough. It seems to me to be even sillier to dismiss it all simply because one refuses to accept evidence that happens to corroborate something in the Bible.
