Noah's Flood: a no-no

This is the first of a few excerpts that I will offer from a work, currently on the block, and likely to be called either MythConceptions. or Oh No, They Didn't. It will look into all those legends that aren't true, bits like the bunyip, the speed of the botfly, 'one in a thousand', Pavlov ringing bells (he didn't), viruses and bacteria that are good for us, sharks that do get cancer, Victorian frills on table legs, a camel that shot a man and throwing Christians to the lions — among other gems of misinformation. Many of these, by the way, have already appeared in trhe almost 700 entries in this blog.

So: did Noah's Flood happen? Answer: not as specified in the Maker's Manual, Genesis 7.

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…and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
—Genesis 7, 19-20, KJV.

Around 400, St Augustine considered the distributions of the animals after Noah's flood, and suggested that either men or angels must have transported them to their present locations. Science says there never was a flood like Noah's, and so the present locations of kangaroos and koalas do not raise a real problem.

If there was a flood in Noah’s time, it certainly wasn’t as described in the Bible, and we know this because Thomas Jefferson was intelligent enough to consider the evidence, to apply science, mathematics and logic. As he saw it, there simply would not have been enough water available.

All the same, Jefferson was only a politician, planter and slave owner, so what would he know? On April 29 1962, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy addressed a gathering of 49 Nobel laureates at the White House with these words:

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

Now that isn’t the sort of comment we might reasonably expect to hear either from, or about, the most recent incumbent of the Oval Office, but Jefferson (1743–1826) really was an amazing intellect. At a time when religious leaders mainly denied that fossils were traces of ancient life, and kept pushing the Biblical ‘truth’ of Genesis, claiming a 6000-year-old planet, Jefferson analysed the available information, and proved that Noah’s flood could never have happened. It appeared in his 1785 Notes on Virginia, and the relevant part reads like this:

The atmosphere, and all its contents, whether of water, air, or other matters, gravitate to the earth, that is to say, they have weight. Experience tells us, that the weight of all these together never exceeds that of a column of mercury of 31 inches height, which is equal to one of rain water of 35 feet high. If the whole contents of the atmosphere then were water, instead of what they are, it would cover the globe but 35 feet deep; but as these waters, as they fell, would run into the seas, the superficial measure of which is to that of the dry parts of the globe, as two to one, the seas would be raised only 52 1–2 feet above their present level, and of course would overflow the lands to that height only.

To put this in perspective, consider these events:

In 1695, John Woodward had published his Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth, proposing that fossils formed when Noah’s flood destroyed the surface of the earth.

In 1696, William Whiston had published his New Theory of the Earth, which suggested that Noah’s deluge might have been caused by a comet striking the earth.

In 1796 (after Jefferson’s analysis, Georges Cuvier attributed the succession of fossil forms to a series of simultaneous extinctions caused by natural catastrophes, one of them Noah’s flood.

In 1823 William Buckland published his Reliquiae Diluvianae, which attributed fossils to caves filled with mud during Noah’s flood.

Our mythologies are full, even today, of flood legends, ranging from Atlantis to Gilgamesh to Noah, our cinemas are full of asteroids, alien invasions, volcanoes, ships sinking and monsters arising from the deep, so we are suckers for a disaster story. At a time when religious leaders mainly denied that fossils were traces of ancient life, and kept pushing the Biblical ‘truth’ of a 6000-year-old planet, Jefferson (1743–1826) analysed the science, and proved that Noah’s flood could never have happened.

Notes on Virginia also reveals his lively interest in fossils, making him an early starter, but he was not the first to realise what fossils were. This was at a time when ordinary people (and even experts like Buckland) still assumed that species were fixed and established forever. Extinct species were generally explained as the losers from Noah’s flood, but around the world, as more and more samples were taken, dissected, drawn and described, the idea that species might change was bound to come up in more and more minds.

Still, there may have been real floods, of a sort, happening around the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. In 1997, oceanographers William Ryan and Walter Pitman suggested that rising sea levels in the Mediterranean around 7500 years ago may have broken through the Bosphorus strait to plunge down into a freshwater lake, lying at a much lower level, producing an apocalyptic flood that may well have inspired legends such as the floods of Noah and Gilgamesh.

Later dredging of the Black Sea seemed to confirm that suggestion when an ancient beach was dredged at a depth of 170 metres (550 feet) and analysis revealed freshwater molluscs dated to 7500 years ago and saltwater species, dated to 6900 years ago.

On the other hand, there used to be people who said the planet is even younger than either of those dates. 

And I have dealt with that, as well.