Is there any evidence of this happening? I know that other religions (mythologies too) have stories of the Great Flood, but I wonder if those stories are just there to explain rainbows and bodies of water.
There is no sound geological evidence for a global flood; some folks insist that a considerable portion of the geologic column was laid down in the short space of time of the flood, but this is simply not borne out by the observed physical evidence (for many reasons).
Then there’s the problem of where all the water came from and where it went afterwards.
I saw a great documentary about the creation of the Black Sea, which (allegedly) was caused by it breaching the Bosphorous, and happened catastrophically over the course of a few weeks. If true, this fits in with the timeline for Sumerian mythology. Or something.
A few years ago there was a popular theory floating around that the Flood occured in the Black Sea region about 7,500 years ago. This area had been home to some pretty advanced civilizations. When the waters of the Mediterranean rose due to climatic changes, peoples settling there were forced to abandon their homelands.
Surely not a global flood, but certainly one that would engrave itself in the collective mind of the nations involved - i.e. mythology.
AFAIK the theory meanwhile has lost some of the popularity it enjoyed when it was published in 1998, but at least it sounds cool.
Links:
http://www.trussel.com/prehist/news165.htm
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/pr/99/11/flood.html
The Biblical Flood as described in Scripture taken literally is fairly easy to disprove. There is simply not enough water available on the planet to submerge the world in its present topography to the point where even the highest mountains are under water. Check out what melting of the Greenland/Arctic and Antarctic icecaps would produce – sea levels rise by about 300 feet. While this covers a bunch of lowlying territory – say goodbye to the Netherlands, Florida, and Louisiana, for example – there’s a huge amount of land above water level.
It’s generally held that (1) the flood story is simple myth; (2) the flood story is a legend recording a massive flood in “the world” of the time, i.e., Mesopotamia; or (3) it’s a retelling of the Gilgamesh-cycle flood stories or related mythology to fit it into the Yahwist worldview. (These can overlap.)
Was the Black Sea theory disproven?
Just worked a text about this recently with some students… and basically there were of course some nasty local floods that might have been exagerrated with time and eventually written into the Bible… or it might refer to some sudden increase of water level due to Ice Cap melting or the end of the last ice age… both very old and so it would have taken quite a staggering amount of oral tradition for this story to survive.
Now floods are far from being supernatural occurences… so I wouldnt take it as proof that the Bible is anything but mythology. A man and his family in a huge ark and hundreds of animals is a bit impossible naturally.