Are there any atheists here who believe in a historical basis for the flood in Genesis?

Question

I don't neccesarily mean a global flood.

Answer 1

perhaps a localized flood, but definitely not a global flood.

Answer 2

There's no historical evidence for a global flood of the kind described in Genesis.

There are, as mentioned, numerous examples of very large floods that affected huge areas of what was the "known world" during various stages of early Middle-Eastern civilization.

It's also not that surprising that the earliest agricultural civilizations, based around the fertile land of the floodplains of the Tigris & Euphrates, the Nile, the Yangtse, and other major rivers would have huge floods as both the worst, and the most likely, calamity that could affect their civilization.

If you go back earlier than that, even before the advent of agriculture and writing of any kind - there was what could almost be considered a global flood.

At the end of the last peak of glaciation, as global temperatures increased and glaciers and ice pack melted, the global sea levels rose.

Most (if not all) of humanity was in nomadic hunter-gatherer groups at the time. Many (probably even a vast majority) lived in coastal regions. As the sea levels rose, their villages and camps were flooded, and they had to move inland. Each year, the waters would have risen a few more feet.

A few feet doesn't sound like much, but in some areas - like the lowland land bridge that once connected New Guinea and Australia, it would have pushed the coastline back by as much as 2 miles a year. And kept doing it, year after year, forcing the bands to move farther and farther from their traditional territories just to keep up with the shore.

You can certainly imagine that these people would have felt the world was flooding, and may never end. The memory of this flood still remains in the folk legends and mythology of the Kitimakara - the Dreamtime tales of Australian aborigine belief. Oral traditions of great floods would have been similarily maintained in other regions, even after the advent of agriculture.

Incidentally, the consequences of such a global sea level rise may well be upon us again in the coming decades. Unfortunately, it's not as easy for us to simply move camp when the waters rise. If you look at the amount of humanity clustered on coasts again, you can see the next big disaster waiting to happen. Can we actually learn from the lessons our ancestors faced?

Answer 3

Not an Atheist, but I don't buy the global flood either. . .

One legend that EVERY culture has is a story of a flood that wiped out civilization.

I have two hypothesis on this.

One is the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago. It is well established that sea levels rose up to 200 feet or more when this happened. There is a cave in France which has Neolithic painting in the upper galleries. The entrance is now 200 feet under water, on an ancient beach. From what we know of climatology today, it is possible that this may have happened relatively quickly.

There is also mounting geologic evidence of a giant asteroid impact in the Indian ocean in early biblical times which unleashed the mother of all tsunamis, and just about did for the Human race.

If you stop and look at a demographic of population centers, even today we tend to congregate near the ocean. An early civilization would have naturally started building cities near the ocean. It simply gives too many advantages in terms of food and trade to ignore.

If the cradle of civilization is within 200 feet of sea level, and the seas rise, either by Tsunami or by climate change, your civilization is now under water. The only people left are illiterate hillbillies.

The evidence of American Indian expansion down the west coast is erased, leaving scientists scratching their heads over how Clovis points got into South America before the great plains.

And those hillbillies talk about it for generation afterwards. The story gets bigger and eventually consumes the whole world. And their children’s children ask questions. “But what about the animals?” An ark extemporaneously gets added to the story. The American Indians have a story of an ark which saved the animals as well. I have met tribal people in the jungles of the Philippines who pointed to a nearby peak and told me “That was where our people went when Noah’s flood came”.

Answer 4

Wow, I'm pretty shocked that most answers point at a localized flood - scripture is pretty clear about a global flood. Historically, there would be little or no possibility of global flood being written about (it would have to have been written by Noah or his family). Additionally, historical narratives, as we know them now, did not exist at the time.

Other stories written about global floods, however, could be used as evidence that it happened - not strong evidence, but some type of evidence nonetheless.

Scientific evidence for a flood exists, however - and its as strong as the evidence for the theory that a meteor or asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Whose to say that a flood was not the catatrophic event that changed the world? After all, a global flood, according the Bible, not only involved rain; likely it also involved volcanoes, earthquakes and all sorts of massive, earth-bending events.

Answer 5

I am an atheist, and I realize that mythology often has a basis in some historical event. Recent evidence suggests that a large asteroid struck the Indian Ocean 300 miles off Madagascar about 5000 years ago and sent tsunamis 600 feet high inland for over a hundred miles in Mesopotamia. The geological evidence for such massive tsunamis include geological chevrons and marine microfossils. A crater has been dated in the Indian Ocean as well. Such an impact would have been followed by many days of rain (due to the heat and force of the impact in the ocean). The inexplicable catastrophe would have had a profound impact on the survivors, and a myth about God's wrath bringing death and destruction would have been the result.

Answer 6

There have been hundreds, if not thousands of localized floods all over the planet during the course of its history. When man was much more scarce and far less educated about the actual size of Earth, it might seem to him that the entire world was flooding when in fact is was just a few hundred miles locally.

Answer 7

Only in terms of a major local flood, perhaps of the Black Sea basin.

When trying to resolve how Genesis should be read, (as a questioning Christian) I workeded through Whitcomb and Morris: "The Genesis Flood" in detail. It was unconvincing, even when I would have preferred to have been convinced.

Answer 8

actually, there is historical evidence of a particularly bad flood in (i want to say but i cant recall for sure) the tigris-euphrates region. it was local, but to the residents of that area it must have seemed so devastating that they thought it was global. there might also have been an equivalent of noah during that event, though whether he was actually hebrew and not some other culture remains to be found. regardless, oral tradition and "the telephone game" probably turned it into the myth we know today.

Answer 9

I am a Christian and I know that the flood never occurred.

Does anyone else realize how many other religions have a flood story? Tons of them do. So did different gods punish different religions with several different floods, only wiping out those parts of the earth?

It's a story. All we are supposed to take from it is its moral. If anyone would like to go on a voyage to find Noah's Ark, be my guest, but I would recommend you pack a lot of food, because you're going to be looking for a long time...

Answer 10

A worldwide flood? No.

Local floods? Sure, they happen all the time.

Does it back up the book? No.
That myth had already become folk tales in a number of other cultures before the whole noah thing was even a thought in the minds of the writers.

Answer 11

I concur with Justin. There is plenty of records of localized floods, especially in the Epic of Gilgamesh (which is remarkably like the Noachian Flood story, but several thousand years older.)