Would you have known that if you lived 2000 years ago?
Two of my pet peeves:
- People that think ancient explanations are stupid because we know better.
- People that think ancient explanations are truth because is says so in their Holy Book.
BTW, excellent whooshing, ronbo. Hey, people, do we need big blaze-orange-colored legal disclaimers in three languages?
Sign me in with the “the story got better as time went by” camp – enough major cultures in the Neolithic/early Bronze ages probably experienced massive disasters – what we’d call a “500-year flood”-- so that an oral tradition of surviving a Great Flood would arise in several places, together with a story that the surviving people and animals floated, that the reputed ancestor of the current population was among the survivors, and why, of course that it was the God(s) who chose him to survive, what other explanation could there be? Plus yes, the preliterate had people smart enough to notice some terrain features that implied there had once been water over the land.
No, that is not compelling. The majority of sources agree that this land was indeed under water.
Ignorance is not an insult, it is the human condition. We are all ignorant of things to which we’ve never been exposed, one cannot be expected to intuitively know everything. There is not enough time or brainpower to know everything.
pet peeve:
3) People that purposely hold on to their ignorance. (Related to pp #2).
sailor: I’m guessing from the tone of your response that this is also one of your pet peeves. I think we are in agreement that there was not a world-wide flood: the land uplifted.
I believe the ancients would have be aware of Seashells buried on mountaintops. My point was that a Flood was a logical explanation for when these stories were written. Why anybody believes these stories now is beyond my understanding.
You guys are making Judge Roy Moore very angry.
By "now’, I mean having the opportunity to review current understanding.
"They could be carried there by swallows. "
What do you mean, African or European swallows?
I agreed with a lot of your post, but the evidence that most of the stories came from one source is the similarity in the stories, analogous to looking at DNA-differentiation and figuring out all dogs came from one domestication of wolves, not several.
It’s not just that there was this big flood - it’s also that one family built a boat and were the only ones to escape the flood.
So is it the Black Sea flood? Impossible to say, but it’s a tantalizing hypothesis the flood stories (or most of them) have one source.
You’re right. It’s not science, until someone can come up with a hypothesis, and a way to test the hypothesis.
However, examining the evidence to come up with hypotheses is not an invalid methodology, so long as one understands they haven’t proved anything, they’ve only generated the right questions. So I disagree with your second statement. Nobody is saying ‘case closed’ (or shouldn’t be). They’re simply recognizing it as an intriguing possibility. Now somebody has to be clever enough to come up with a way to test it.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist…and SOMEONE was going to say it…
Yep, Flying Monk, I was working my way thru the remaining posts to be sure nobody had beaten me to it.
Also trying to work in the joke about “they could have had it on a line”.
I’m so ashamed.
: quietly stepping into the line behind Flying_Monk and Phnord Prephect :
I flatly do not believe this. Take a look at the link in Astro’s post, especially Part 2. (Giving tentative credence to this site, since we don’t know where he got the material from or how accurately it is paraphrased.) The first few myths mentioned there have a surface similarity, pardon the pun. But the deeper in you go the more differences appear.
Is this the similarity you refer to? If so, read the flood myths pages again, because it just ain’t so.
I guess it is. It’s also a hypothesis that floods are so common and the metaphor of washing away evil so compelling that flood myths should be widely spread but locally generated, especially in the total absence of any plausible mechanism for worldwide dissemination of the memory of a single event.
Floods happen. Flood myths happen. That’s all we know for sure. Which should we go with as our working hypothesis, yours or mine?
Intriguing doesn’t trump plausible. Occam’s Razor (which for a change I think is actually applicable here) tells me to use my hypotheses as our basis for understanding until some contrary evidence appears.
Please note that there is pretty good evidence that suggests that there was no such Black Sea flood (i.e., the “Noah’s Ark Hypothesis”):
Link to the full article (HTML):
Link to the full contents of the issue of GSA Today the article appeared in (includes a link to the pdf version):
That wasn’t the OP.
NEEP!
Almost had coffee come out my nose at the thought of migrating coconuts … I’ll now get in line too.