Literalness of the global flood/Noah's Ark

[jfro18]

I was listening to a bunch of Infants on Thrones (IoT) this week while working outside, and as an early aside I highly recommend their 5 part series going over the 'Seven Deadly Heresies' talk that just wrapped up.

Anyway - it got me thinking about the literal necessity of the church for both the global flood and Adam and Eve.

For this topic I figured just stick with the flood. I've been reading about the 'global flood' vs 'local flood' myth/story/records lately since I have always just kind of assumed it was more of a myth/lesson than literal, but that the church needs it to be a literal global flood to work. When listening to IoT, they mentioned how so many civilizations thrived during the flood times, but as I've tried to research online I can't find any civilizations that have records that date prior to the flood, which leaves those who believe in a literal flood to point to this as a reason that life ceased to exist as the flood hit.

Obviously for me I find this ridiculous anyway. No way did China thrive as it did with the only 8 people in the world in the 'Old World' for generations. Same for other areas of the world, and of course it puts the church in a massive bind: You need a literal flood to get Noah from America to Mountains of Ararat, but that flood also kills everyone in the Americas who are now needed to prove the Book of Mormon isn't a complete lie due to DNA studies.

Anyway - just curious what everyone thought here. We know the flood is a myth that predates the Bible, but I just was wondering if anyone had specific civilizations with 'verifiable' records around flood times *or* thriving civilizations directly around the flood time.

Just seems like this is yet another area where the church is screwed -- they *need* a literal Bible to make their own theology work, but the more we learn, the more the Bible can not be literal and be taken seriously. To me this is as big of a problem as Book of Mormon anachronisms/historical evidence because it relies so dearly to an interpretation of the Bible that just hasn't held up to time/science/basic knowledge. And even FAIR does quite the dance with this topic, because they know the global flood makes no sense, but they know the church is tied to it. It would be funny if their mental gymnastics didn't keep doubters in line.

[dogbite]

The flood is generally placed about 2500 BC. Some as late as 2200 as I recall. The bookmark I got in seminary put it around 2350



There are Sumerian and eqyotian records from that era generally as well as Asian.

[slavereeno]

Yeah, but Hemenly Father just used magic to relocate stuff and things, cuz faith!

The TBM get out jail free card.

[Hagoth]

When listening to IoT, they mentioned how so many civilizations thrived during the flood times, but as I've tried to research online I can't find any civilizations that have records that date prior to the flood, which leaves those who believe in a literal flood to point to this as a reason that life ceased to exist as the flood hit.

The flood is generally dated at around 2300 BC

Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing originated around 3100 BC and Cuneiform goes back to possibly 3800 BC. Both forms of writing continued nonstop right through the flood. Even a local flood should have wiped out the Mesopotamian civilizations.

Sargon of Akkad was building the world's first empire at exactly the time of the flood, and it was the first of a series of Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hittite, etc. empires that lasted right through the entire Old Testament period.

If you haven't read the story of Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh it's quite an eye-opener, considering that it predates Noah by centuries.

[dogbite]

But yes the TOKEN of the rainbow and the principle of the TOKEN is key to LDS doctrine of the temple. And some other esoterica. If the flood is local or mythic, so is the TOKEN and the related TOKEN doctrines.

So yes, the flood story is essential to our salvation. And if you can discard scripture deemed non salvific, there are so many problems. Plus the flood story or it's cast is directly referenced in all of our modern revealed scripture as literal as well.

[slavereeno]

The flood is generally placed about 2500 BC. Some as late as 2200 as I recall. The bookmark I got in seminary put it around 2950



There are Sumerian and eqyotian records from that era generally as well as Asian.

Hey, I remember that bookmark!

[Corsair]

I should probably stop attending Gospel Doctrine class during second hour of church. I see the literalness going on all around me and I doubt anyone wants to discuss what other nations were happily doing during the time of the flood. 2400 BC was the right in the middle of the Egyptian Old Kingdom including the Great Pyramid at Giza built around 2560 BC. This time also includes the city state of Sumer and the Minoan civilization on the Isle of Crete. We even know have clear evidence of the Norte Chico civilization in Peru at that time, which will be attributed to the Jaredites if apologists spend any time on this subject.

None of these civilizations talk about Noah's Flood. If this was just a legend or a regional event, then it solves a lot of problems except for those exacerbated by the followers of Bruce McConkie. "Mormon Doctrine" by McConkie insists that baptism by immersion is required for the Earth so a global flood must be a central tenet of Mormonism.

[Palerider]

I'm thinking global or nearly global flood is a distinct possibility but my timeline is moved WAY back. Like when the asteroid hit that wiped out all the dinosaurs. I think there have been numerous large scale impacts. And the possibility of hitting water is much greater than hitting dry land.

I'll have to do some checking but that one they found that smacked the ocean just on the edge of the Yucatan peninsula was a monster. The asteroid/meteor was figured to be between 6 and 9 miles across. That's nearly a planet killer.

Make a wave big enough to effect the entire globe? I'm betting it could be close. Did any of them occur in the early development of mankind?

I'd be interested to know.

[achilles]

There have been global floods in the history of Homo sapiens, but none that have covered the whole earth. Obviously there are flood myths in many cultures... We as a species have memory of cataclysm, but it would have had to happen way before written language....say, 10000 years ago...

Was there a flood where God asks a dude to make a boat, gather every animal, and repopulate the earth...no way. Some folks have put the minimum viable human population at around 5000 people! (potentially causing BoM mutations and deformities!) I think Adam and Eve never met... they were thousands of years apart...

I can't believe I used to read those Skousen books and think that they actually represented human history...

Yeah, these things create some problems for the literal believer... better to believe Skousen.

[blazerb]

Oxford tells me that Britain has been continuously inhabited for 12,000 years. See here: http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/settlers/. Evidence for a global flood would come from biology, geology, paleontology, and archaeology. None of these include any possibility of a global flood. The Earth is unbaptized. Also, I saw a rainbow the other day. No baptism by fire for at least a year.

[2bizE]

This was the very first item on my shelf. I've rationalized it so much and come to the conclusion it never happened. The people were so ethnocentric during this time. They thought only of their small bubble of people. They thought the world was them, and them only. There may have been some flooding natural disaster, but to think all on earth but 8 were saved and all humans since then came from these 8 people is preposterous. Mr. Holland has spoken of the literalness of the flood. I find him to be deceived by his own lies.

[Archimedes]

Make a wave big enough to effect the entire globe? I'm betting it could be close. Did any of them occur in the early development of mankind?

I'd be interested to know.

In a way, maybe so. Whatever big sky rock killed the dinos paved the way for the Age of Mammals. Just a shade under 66 million years later, there we are! Gnawing on fresh tapir meat under the obelisk. The rest is history of course.

[moksha]

There are aboriginal rock paintings in Australia from around 40,000 BCE. They were not washed out by any flood. The closest primitive man came to a big flood was the Mediterranean Basin filling from the gradual ice melt. Even more recently when the banks of the Mediterranean gave way and let water flood into what is now the Black Sea. There is not enough unmelted water on the earth to completely submerge the continents.

The flood was a fanciful story most likely transformed from the flood story of the Sumerian tablets. Wish all the tablets were still in existence. The one about Gilgamesh and Enkidu catching a giant wave and surfing all the way to Malibu Beach at Independence, Missouri would have made an exciting Sunday School story. Guess we will just have to be content with the one about the Ark.

[jfro18]

The interesting part of this discussion is that as I'm reading about it online, a lot of it is obviously from non-Mormons. So you have people moving the goalposts to say 'maybe the flood was *earlier* than thought and that these civilizations were actually later than thought.'

So basically the only way to make a literal global flood work is to mold science into the ball you need to mold it into. It's definitely interesting to watch non-LDS people do it since I really hadn't ventured into Biblical problems as much. And to me the bigger problem for the LDS church is that you need a global flood to get Noah from America to the Old World, which is what happens when you write Biblical fan fiction with no understanding of science/history/etc.

Thanks for the replies... trying to search these different groups/civilizations and of course getting the standard blowback that they weren't there when we were told they were. The Noah's Ark story always seemed so incredibly stupid if you took it literally, but when I was at church I honestly didn't think about it too much because you can't if you want to maintain sanity.