The Deluge and the Ark Seekers
The literal interpretation of the Bible has throughout history resulted in conflicts with and repudiations of science. The view of the Earth as round or of the Sun being the center of the solar system, for example, were strongly contested by biblical literalists who believed that, if the revelations of their ancient scriptures appeared to contradict a scientific revelation, then science must be wrong. Perhaps no field of science has come into greater conflict with religion than that of geology. According to Judeo-Christian tradition, God created all things over the course of six days at the beginning of time, which was almost universally placed by theologians around 4000 BCE. Thus, the discovery of fossil remains became problematic. As early as the 6th century BCE, philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon recognized that fossils were the remains of living creatures, and the great age of these remains was apparent. The presence of lifeforms that may have preceded Adam challenged two biblical notions: that no life existed prior to Adam’s creation, and that death did not exist until after the Fall of Man. Early attempts by Christian theologians to address these problems tended to the absurd. They claimed that fossils represented the early models of abandoned creations, a notion that conceives of God as a kind of tinkerer in a workshop and would seem to undercut the claim of God’s omniscience and infallibility. Otherwise, fossils were thought of by churchmen as “sports of nature,” or “capricious fabrications of God,” hidden purposely within the Earth, likely as a test of mankind’s faith in the Bible. This notion of scientific discoveries that contradicted biblical claims being tests of faith would be asserted again and again. But men of faith had another explanation up their sleeves to account for fossils: the Flood of Noah. Most of us likely know the story. Angered at the sinfulness of mankind, as well as the sexual escapades of certain rebel angels among humanity, God sent forth a deluge to wipe the slate clean. The fountains of the deep broke up, and the windows of heaven opened, and it rained for forty days and forty nights, drowning the entirety of the earth, even the highest mountains, killing all living things, even every creeping thing, except for Noah’s family and a breeding pair of every animal, who were saved from the flood in a massive boat constructed according to God’s design to preserve life. This was the perfect explanation for fossils as it was supported by the Bible and did not threaten Judeo-Christian belief, and thus early Christian apologists, like Tertullian and St. Augustine, took it up and spread it wide. In the Renaissance, though, it began to be questioned by thinkers such as Leonardo DaVinci and Bernard Palissy. In the 17th century, Nicholas Steno pioneered the science of stratigraphy, laying the foundation, so to speak, of our modern geological principle of the superposition of rock strata, and in the 18th century, the father of modern geology, James Hutton, by examining such strata, first began to recognize the enormity of the geologic time scale. The science was irrefutable, and despite some orthodox holdouts, like Cotton Mather and others in the 19th century who believed mastodon bones were actually the bones of Nephilim giants destroyed in the Flood, gradually the thinking men of Christianity defected and came to recognize that the findings of geologists could no longer be denied, necessitating some change in their understanding of the age of the Earth and the narratives in the Bible. The fact that science and reason won out in the late 19th century may be surprising to those of us today, who, like me, were raised to believe that dinosaur bones were baked into the earth at Creation just to mess with our minds, that the Grand Canyon was formed by the Biblical Flood, and that Noah’s Ark was sitting atop a mountain in the Near East somewhere, waiting to be discovered by some brave Indiana Jones-esque archeologist. What happened between then and now to so reverse the victory of science over religious superstition?
There is a name for what happened after the 19th century victory of science over biblical literalism to explain the commonality of modern belief in the literal and inerrant truth of the Bible. We can identify as the principal reason for this change the rise of Fundamentalism, a global religious phenomenon at the beginning of the 20th century that sought to move society away from secularism and revert to a religious order, enshrining spiritual traditions over democratic or humanistic values. Specifically, in the United States, the Christian Fundamentalist revival reacted strongly against the influx of non-Protestant immigrant populations and their growing awareness of other world religions, as well as against the perceived elitism of educators who taught concepts they felt were at odds with the teachings of their scriptures. Sound familiar? One of the principal scientific doctrines that Christian fundamentalists opposed was that of evolution, which, because of the great time frames required, they felt contradicted the story of a 6-day creation in Genesis and the long formerly held notion that Creation had occurred only about 6000 years ago. In opposition to the teaching of evolution, Fundamentalists began to call their literalist biblical view Creationism, and to suggest it was an equally scientific alternative. Formerly, Creationists were content to alter their views of the Biblical story of Creation to accommodate science. These Old Earth Creationists suggested that each day of Creation actually represented an entire geological age, or that there was a gap of millions of years between the creation of heaven and earth and the creation of light, a gap omitted and unacknowledged in Genesis chapter one. But more and more, such an accommodating view seemed unacceptable to fundamentalist Creationists. One writer who rejected anything but the most strictly literal reading of Genesis was George McCready Price, a Seventh-Day Adventist. Price adhered to the teachings of his religion’s founder, Ellen G. White, who emphasized the infallibility of scriptures and who wrote extensively about visions she’d had regarding the global flood described in Genesis. Price published his pseudo-scientific Creationist writings extensively, between 1906 and his death in 1963, and even posthumously. His writings attacked evolution by exposing what he claimed were logical errors made by theoretical geologists. He criticized all the principles of stratigraphy and propped up a form of flood geology updated for the 20th century. The scientific community did not take his work seriously and his writings even drew refutation from prominent fossil experts like David Starr Jordan, the President of Stanford University, who pointed out that his claims were predicated on “scattering mistakes, omissions, and exceptions against general truths that anybody familiar with the facts in a general way can not possibly dispute.” Nevertheless, when the Scopes monkey trial, the ultimate challenge to evolution in schools, came along, Clarence Darrow relied on Price’s claims in his arguments against the Old Earth Creationist arguments of William Jennings Bryant, who saw that religion could accept science without conflict. After Price’s death, his writings on flood geology were taken up by the next generation of Creationists, who touted the idea of “Creation Science,” a contradiction in terms, of course, since such an event as divine creation cannot be observed and tested and is, therefore, outside the purview of science. Creationists John Whitcomb and Henry Morris even managed to enshrine Price’s version of flood geology as the orthodox position of fundamentalists in their 1961 book, The Genesis Flood. So-called Creation Science was eventually ruled unscientific and kept out of public school science curriculum, as was its successor, “Intelligent Design.” Both were declared little more than thinly-veiled religious crusades pretending at science. But the culture war waged from every fundamentalist preacher’s pulpit has been very successful in turning the minds of congregants like, for example, my parents, against consensus scientific fact, and organizations like the Institute for Creation Research and the Discovery Institute, as well as countless Creationist websites and groups, continue to cast doubt on the scientific reality of the great age of the earth, which has since been empirically confirmed through observation and testing countless times, such that it is beyond reasonable doubt.
George McCready Price, the resuscitator of flood geology and champion of “Creation Science.”
Ever since the Renaissance, believers in a literal global flood and Noah’s Ark have attempted to demonstrate how this fantastical story is actually very believable. Since it was taken for granted that, being in the Bible, the story must be accurate, Renaissance thinkers tried to determine how such a ship must have been designed to accommodate so many creatures. According to the scriptures, the ark was constructed out of 450 cubed cubits of gopher wood and sealed with pitch against the floodwaters, as well as supernaturally sealed up by God himself according to Genesis 7, with only one window described, apparently in the top of the vessel to let sunlight in. So there was some question of how the occupants disposed of their feces. Early 15th century Spanish theologian Alphonso Tostado handily explained this issue away by imagining the interior of the ark, with Noah’s living quarters on the upper decks and a series of stairs that allowed him and his sons to feed the animals in their stalls as well as to carry away their waste, which they must have fed into the bilge of the craft, he claimed. Hand waving the foul stench that must have emitted from such an arrangement, he explained that “[o]ne could also believe that the odour of the dung was miraculously carried off so that the air was not corrupted.” In the next century, French geometer Johannes Buteo did Tostado one better, calculating the precise interior measurements and determining how much space animals of certain kinds would require, as well as how much space would be needed for feed, and how the ship might accommodate all of this, as well as a gristmill and smokeless ovens for Noah and his family’s subsistence. From the Renaissance to the modern age of Creationism and science denial, thinkers have postulated just how the feat of housing a breeding pair of each creature could have been pulled off. Logically, they could do without pairs of any hybrid creatures, like mules. They would need only a breeding pair for all the animals such hybrid species originated from. Just how they would determine that the pair they chose would be successfully reproductive is unclear, but you could always hand wave that by suggesting God had pointed out which pairs to take aboard. However, they must have had more than a pair of some creatures so that they could feed them to the carnivores. Certain animals, of course, required more room than others. For example, snakes, some thought, would be content to wind themselves around beams and would need no chambers of their own, though I can’t imagine having loose snakes on a boat would be a great idea, especially those of a venomous variety. Johannes Buteo even considered where Noah might have fit aquariums to save species of marine life, hitting on one of the major problems with the Flood Myth: why marine lifeforms would even be destroyed by a flood. Buteo considered that perhaps fish were without sin and thus allowed to swim free outside the ark, in the waters of the Deluge. But this was far from the last of the problems with the story. When naturalists in the Age of Exploration began to document the variety of unique animal species in different regions of the world, the question was raised, if these creatures had been made at Creation and then preserved on the same Ark, and their presence was explained by the dispersion of species after the landing of the Ark, then why were some species only found in one place while others were found in many places? This would not be the last problem with the Flood myth with which biblical literalists would have to perform mental gymnastics to contend.
One of the principal impossibilities of the story of Noah’s ark comes from the construction of such a massive and seaworthy vessel itself. Creationists will say that God himself gave Noah the ship’s specifications, or they would vaguely suggest that ancient man was capable of many great feats of engineering, as seen in the Seven Wonders of the World. The problem is, if ancient man really had this divine knowledge of massive shipbuilding, then it unaccountably disappeared afterward. If Noah lived for hundreds of years after making it back on dry land, why was this God-given science of naval architecture promptly lost? We’re meant to believe that Noah traveled to all kinds of different habitats to acquire all kinds of different animals, which would certainly mean that some species he was entirely unfamiliar with, not knowing the dangers they posed or the requirements for how best to house them. Yet somehow, he was able to design quarters for each that would allow him to water each at an appropriate height and keep each from injuring itself within its enclosure. All within a boat the size of a skyscraper that could withstand the buffeting of violent waves. It would have been the greatest feat of engineering in all human history, and if we’re to believe God provided Noah with complete instructions, blueprints, if you will, then it beggars the imagination that Noah would have been capable of reading and following them. After all, he was just a humble farmer. On that topic, how could a farmer have paid for all the timber and all the labor it would have required to build such a construct? The only comparable ancient feat of engineering, the pyramids, is estimated to have required the labor of 100,000 people. Moreover, he would have needed many tons of pitch to seal it up as the scriptures state he did, but pitch, a natural hydrocarbon formed underground at extreme pressures, would not have existed in the antediluvian world if we are to subscribe to flood geology. Lastly, there is the simple impossibility that 40 days of rain could possibly drown the entire world, even its highest mountains. Ancient apologists, using the hints in the scriptures about the firmament separating the waters above and below, as well as the verse about the fountains of the deep being broken, held the belief that there had formerly been a great mass of water suspended overhead, as well as a watery abyss below ground, all of which waters crashed down and sprang to the surface at once. But even if one were to credit such a weird cosmogony, it doesn’t explain how so much water would disappear so quickly, such that the ark could find land again after only 150 days, and after a year and change the earth was all dried out again. The suspension of disbelief required is extraordinary, leading some believers to concede that maybe it wasn’t worldwide, but rather a regional flood.
1493 artist's depiction of the construction of the Ark.
As I reported in the beginning of my series on giants, in 1872, a British banknote engraver named George Smith who was such an enthusiast of the British Museum’s collection that they hired him to study some clay fragments taken from Ninevah, cried eureka one day when he had translated a portion of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh that appeared to confirm the biblical story of the Flood. In this passage, the story of Uta-Napishti or Utnapishtim is related, in which he is forewarned by the god Ea of a catastrophic flood that would be sent by the god Enlil, and therefore urged to build a ship for the survival of his family and animals that he preserves. In this version, the storm subsides after only 7 days, when his ship lands on a mountainside. As with the biblical tale, there is an account of Utnapishtim releasing a bird to ascertain whether the floodwaters had sufficiently receded. Unsurprisingly, George Smith thought he had discovered proof of the literal truth of the Bible and evidence against the geologic time scale and evolutionary theory. Unfortunately for proponents of this claim, the math doesn’t precisely line up. Those who believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible typically place Creation at around 4004 BCE, and the Flood at around 2348 BCE, judging by the dubious genealogies I discussed in the previous episode. The oldest surviving version of the Gilgamesh poem is dated to around 2000 BCE, but it purports to tell the story of a Sumerian king who, based on surviving Sumerian sources, like the Sumerian King List, likely lived around 2700 BCE. Now, to qualify this, the lengths of the reigns of antediluvian and post-diluvian kings in the Sumerian King List are just as problematic as the genealogies of Genesis, with figures ruling for many thousands of years before the flood and many hundreds of years after. Nevertheless, all signs point to the Epic of Gilgamesh being a mythical tradition that predates the story told in Genesis. And since Smith’s discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, other Near Eastern flood myths that predate Genesis have turned up. There is the Mesopotamian Epic of Atra-hasis, which appears to have preceded the Gilgamesh epic and to have served as the source for the story of Utnapishtim found in that poem. In this epic, Atra-Hasis is the Noah figure, warned again by Ea of Enlil’s intentions and told to build a roofed boat sealed with pitch. The predecessor of the Atra-Hasis epic, the Eridu Genesis or ancient Sumerian creation myth, was discovered in 1893 on a tablet in the ruins of the ancient city of Nippur, founded around 5000 BCE, and it was translated in 1912. In it, one Ziusudra is commanded by the god Enki to build a boat and preserve his family from the coming storm. So as we can see, rather than going to prove the veracity of the Genesis flood myth, these other Near Eastern flood myths actually show us that the Genesis flood story is just a common myth of the region, passed down from Ancient Sumeria, to Babylonia, and then incorporated into Judaism, whose founder, Abraham, is believed to have lived in Sumerian Babylon.
If the Genesis flood is merely a retelling of the Sumerian flood myth, then it would stand to reason that it is the story of a localized flood, perhaps relating to the annual flooding of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers in Mesopotamia, which may have seemed to drown the whole world for Mesopotamians, but was certainly not a global Deluge. Some will protest this, pointing to other flood myths not originating from the region, such as the Greek myth of Deucalion, but of course, the myth of Deucalion seems to have been borrowed by the Greeks, a migration of myth, which did not require an actual flood to have taken place. It has sometimes been argued that the lack of flood myths in Asia proves that all flood myths describe a regional rather than a global event, and this certainly holds true when no flood myth appears to have been preserved by ancient civilizations. However, there were Asian flood myths. In India, the story of Manu tells of a sole survivor of a flood, who built a boat and ran aground on a mountaintop. And in China, there were no less than four separate flood myths, those of Nü Kua, Kung Kung, Kun, and Yü. Even as far away as Central America, a variety of Mesoamerican peoples appear to have had their own flood myths. This is no proof of a worldwide flood, however, but rather evidence that people everywhere are the same. If they live in an area prone to flooding, they fear the flooding, and believe it was sent by a god, and any who survive a flood in a vessel come to believe they have been spared by a god, and they tell their children as much. The variation in these more distant traditions is enough to prove that they hold little resemblance to the Near Eastern traditions and represent the separate legends of distinct regions, based on local floods if based on any actual event. In Mesoamerican myths, the survivors do not preserve animals, just themselves, in hollow logs, and afterward are turned into dogs or are obliged to repopulate the world by lying with a weird supernatural dog that takes the shape of a woman. In the Indian myth, Manu is more like Adam, being the first man, and he is told of the coming catastrophe by a fish to whom he had previously been kind. Again, not preserving animals, Manu alone survives, and creates woman by pouring sour milk into the sea after he lands. The Chinese myths are perhaps the most distinct, as they do not tell of a sole survivor that rides out the flood on a boat but rather of a hero who saves the world by controlling the flood. These myths clearly seem to have originated from flood-prone regions around the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, where inhabitants had to develop flood management techniques, such as retention barriers and drainage, in order to survive.
The so-called Flood Tablet, containing the flood myth preserved in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In 1997, a new, seemingly credible scientific hypothesis was published by two marine geologists, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, proposing that around 8,000 years ago, the Black Sea, which had previously been a freshwater lake, was suddenly and cataclysmically inundated by seawater that broke through a natural dam. According to them, this “sudden infill” hypothesis would mean the displacement of a great many Neolithic farmers, whose oral tradition about the catastrophe may have been the origin of Near Eastern Flood myths. By their estimation, an earthquake caused the natural dam to break, resulting in a violent jet of water they figure was 20 times more powerful than Niagara Falls. To support their theory, they produced sophisticated computer models, cited certain seafloor features they argue could only have been caused by the currents of this catastrophic inundation of saltwater, identified a “debris fan” in the area where they believed the flooding would have deposited materials, and pointed to saltwater mollusk fossils in a certain sedimentary layer that they argue must have appeared suddenly. I am not much opposed to this theory myself, as at its heart, it argues for a non-literal interpretation of Genesis. First of all, if the theory were proven accurate, it would not prove anything about the origin of the flood myth. And if one chose to believe it did, it necessitates a non-literal reading of the Bible. It would mean the flood was local, not global. It would require acknowledgement that the Genesis story is just one mythologized iteration of a mytheme passed down through multiple cultures, and it would mean the time frame of Creationists is dead wrong. The world could not have been created 6000 years ago if the flood described in Genesis occurred some 8000 year ago. However, the scientific community has not been so open to the possibility. In the years after the first work of Ryan and Pitman appeared, a great deal of peer-reviewed scholarly research was published refuting their claims. According to academic consensus today, all evidence suggests that the Black Sea gradually filled with saltwater over thousands of years prior to the date that Ryan and Pitman pinpointed. Their evidence comes from cores taken from the Black Sea floor that show sediment laid down under several meters of water at a location that Ryan and Pitman claim would have been dry at the time. Moreover, they mapped an entire history of the slow rise of water levels by identifying on the Black Sea floor the lagoons and beach ridges that steady rise must have caused. They even discovered a delta where sea water was pouring into the Black Sea 10,000 years ago. Ryan and Pitman offer alternative explanations for all their findings, but the scholarly community rightly points out that they are outliers, and that they have proceeded in their investigations on very unscientific grounds. Ryan, it seems, had been obsessed with the myth of Noah’s flood for 30 years, and all his findings are colored by his desire to prove the truth behind the myth in some way. This may have made for more popular science, grabbing the attention of news organizations and the general public, but it did not make for a sound scientific process.
William Ryan is not alone in his obsession with the Flood myth. For most, however, the object of their obsession is not geological evidence of a flood but rather the ark itself, a kind of MacGuffin artifact that many Christian wannabe Indiana Joneses have sought for about a century. These ark seekers follow clues in ancient writings as well as more modern rumors. Their first clue is in Genesis, Chapter 8 verse 4, when it says the ark came to rest “upon the mountains of Ararat.” But where is that? In the first century, CE, Flavius Josephus recorded a rumor that the ark could be found in eastern Turkey, or Armenia, a rumor that would be repeated by numerous other writers, including Eusebius of Caesarea, over the next several centuries. Likely because of this well-known rumor, a certain mountain in Turkey came to be called Ararat by medieval Europeans. Then in the 14th century, the Travels of Sir John Mandeville was published. In this work, which I discussed in my episode on Prester John, the English knight Sir John Mandeville writes of a monk who found the ark on Ararat and managed to bring back a plank of it as proof. Mandeville gave precise details about the abbey at the base of the mountain where the plank was kept, but no such abbey has ever been found, and most scholars now believe the Travels of Sir John Mandeville is entirely fantasy, and that even its knightly author is a literary construct. In the late 19th century, rumors once more surged. In 1883, a New Zealand newspaper printed a hoax about an avalanche revealing the ark, and the story circulated widely. In 1887, one John Joseph Nouri claimed to have summited Ararat and discovered the ark. Something of a mysterious figure, he made a career out of this claim, traveling widely and lecturing about his discovery without every offering any proof. In 1940, ark seeker fever arrived in America, when a Christian fundamentalist pamphlet called New Eden published the claim that a Russian pilot named Roskovitsky had discovered the ark on Ararat in 1917. In the first example of a recurring theme about atheists attempting to hide the discovery of the ark because it represented evidence of the Bible’s accuracy, the story claimed that the Bolsheviks promptly destroyed Roskovitsky’s report on the discovery as soon as they took power. In 1982, one Violet Cummings published a book entitled Has Anybody Really Seen Noah’s Ark? in which she promoted numerous unverified rumors and fired up a generation of would-be ark-seekers. Though no one had ever found proof of Roskovitsky’s actual existence, she claimed to have tracked the story down to Roskovitsky’s widow. She also repeated a story told to her by a Seventh-Day Adventist preacher who claimed an Armenian peasant once told him about a group of British atheists hiring his father as a guide on their expedition up Ararat. They intended to prove the ark was not there, but upon finding it, they supposedly “went into a Satanic rage” and swore the peasant’s father to secrecy, threatening to torture and murder him if he ever revealed that they had found the ark. Beyond the conspiracy of atheists to cover up the truth of the Bible, the old Smithsonian cover-up chestnut also shows up in the lore of the ark seekers. In 1972, a story appeared about a joint expedition between the Smithsonian and the National Geographic Society in 1968. Supposedly, this expedition recovered all the remains of the ark, as well as the alabaster coffin of Noah, which still contained his remains. Unsurprisingly, the Smithsonian investigator, whose existence has never been confirmed, was said by the pseudonymous author, whose identity has never been revealed, to have hidden all this evidence because it would pose a problem for evolutionary theory, which it wouldn’t.
John Joseph Nouri, mystery man who claimed to have found the Ark, was at one time committed to an insane asylum in America, and was later crowned Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church.
There have been numerous real expeditions to Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark. Let’s have a look at how those turned out. In 1829, Friedrich Parrot ascended Ararat, and in his account of the expedition, he claimed Armenians believed the ark was atop the summit and, conveniently, prevented anyone from getting near it out of a sense of respect for the artifact. In 1876, James Bryce climbed Ararat and claimed to have found a piece of cut wood. This represents the first of many claims of recovering ark fragments that cannot be proven genuine. In 1955, French adventurer Fernand Navarre scaled the mountain and brought back a piece, not of gopherwood but of oak. He had to lie to the Turkish government about why he was entering the country, a common aspect of more modern ark expeditions, and he took many photos of himself and his son during their climb. He claims to have found the ark, covered in ice, and to have sawed off the piece he brought back. Suspiciously, he took no photos of the actual ark. Afterward, he claimed to have had an expert in Cairo date the wood to between 4,000 and 6,000 years old, but his piece of wood has since been carbon dated to around the 7th or 8th century CE. In 1982, fundamentalist Christian astronaut James Irwin, who had undertaken an Ararat expedition after resigning from NASA, fell 100 feet down the mountain and was knocked out cold. He returned a month later, despite his wife’s concern that his head injury had left him less than rational, as he insisted his family join him and that they could do without the proper equipment. When that expedition likewise failed, he came back in 1983, this time with a guide, and he found some wood sticking out of the snow during his climb. He was sure he’d found it, but had to descend without it due to a blizzard. When he managed to find it again 11 months later, he discovered that it was, in fact, a pair of abandoned skis. So it went with Irwin’s expeditions. In 1985, Kurdish guerillas prevented his ascent. In 1986, Turkish authorities detained him and his film crew on suspicion of espionage. Eventually, he gave up, and his ill-fated attempts represent well the attempts of all ark seekers. When they aren’t lying, they are simply failing.
The efforts of Creationists to prove their flood geology and of ark seekers to discover Noah’s big boat continue today. In fact, in 2016 in Kentucky, a Creationist theme park opened called Ark Encounter, complete with a 500-foot ark that they claim is “life size” and “historically accurate,” including exhibits that show you how Noah was able to fit and feed all those animals, though the supposed replica ark is only a façade with just three decks open to the public. Elsewhere in this theme park, one can take children to visit a Creation Museum, attend presentations at the “Answers Center” that reveal “Answers in Genesis,” and even enjoy an entertaining virtual reality experience called the “Truth Traveler.” As this is all clearly an elaborate indoctrination center, children unsurprisingly receive free admission. But, today, the search for the ark is more like the search for UFOs. Rather than mounting arduous expeditions, ark seekers pore over satellite imagery and point at “anomalies,” arguing they have finally found the ark. Despite all the weight of reason and evidence to convince the world that the story of Noah’s Ark is just a myth, fundamentalists anchor their faith on the literal truth of this tale and every other tale in their religious document. Surely much of this urge can be attributed to xenophobia and ethnocentrism, for if a fundamentalist admits that the stories told by their religion are mere myths used as analogies and metaphors to teach spiritual lessons, then they must admit that other religions have about as much claim to truth as theirs. Now don’t get me wrong. Archaeology has proven the literal truth of certain elements of the Bible. For example, the real existence of Gath, home of Goliath, or the actual site of Jericho, the city in Canaan whose walls miraculously fell when the Israelites sounded their trumpets. But archaeology tends to discredit at the same time that it confirms. Excavations of Gath turn up no giant skeletons, nor do excavations of Canaanite cities like Jericho for that matter, and excavations of Jericho show that it was not highly populated and was never a walled city at the time when Joshua is supposed to have assaulted its walls. But Christians should not take the findings of science as discrediting their beliefs. Those beliefs hinge on the idea that a moral code has been vouchsafed to them by a deity. The Bible’s inherent worth is as a moral document, not as a historical record. Disproving the literal accuracy of any story within it does not reduce its value as a vehicle to convey moral lessons. If fundamentalist Christians would place more value on the spiritual content of their scriptures than on their value as any kind of accurate chronicle, they would find themselves mostly impervious to the discoveries and criticisms of scientists.
American astronaut and failed ark seeker, James Irwin.
Further Reading
Birrell, Anne. “The Four Flood Myth Traditions of Classical China.” T’oung Pao, vol. 83, no. 4-5, BRILL, 1997, pp. 213–59, doi.org/10.1163/15685322-90000015.
Conant, Eve. “In Search of Noah’s Ark.” Newsweek (International, Atlantic Edition), Newsweek LLC, 2003, p. 46–.
Holden, Constance. “‘Noah’s Flood’ Theory Questioned.” Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 296, no. 5577, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2002, pp. 2331–2331, doi.org/10.1126/science.296.5577.2331a.
Kerr, Richard A. “Marine Geology. Support Is Drying up for Noah’s Flood Filling the Black Sea.” Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 317, no. 5840, 2007, p. 886–.
Montgomery, David R. The Rocks Don’t Lie : a Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood. 1st ed., W.W. Norton, 2012.
Moore, Robert A. “The Impossible Voyage of Noah’s Ark.” Creation/Evolution Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, Winter 1983. National Center for Science Education, ncse.ngo/impossible-voyage-noahs-ark.
Schiermeier, Quirin. “Noah’s Flood.” Nature (London), vol. 430, no. 7001, 2004, pp. 718–19, doi.org/10.1038/430718a.
Toumey, Christopher P. “Who’s Seen Noah’s Ark? (controversial Ark Sightings).” Natural History, vol. 106, no. 9, Natural History Magazine, Inc, 1997, pp. 14–17.
Weber, Christopher Gregory. “The Fatal Flaws of Flood Geology.” Creation/Evolution Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, Summer 1980. National Center for Science Education, ncse.ngo/fatal-flaws-flood-geology.
