But it's WRITTEN!

If you accept the Bible's chronology the Flood happened between 2500 and 2300 BC.

The Egyptians, a civilization which features prominently in the Bible and were certainly local enough that a flood which covered Mount Ararat would have covered them even if it weren't truly a worldwide flood, have continuous written records stretching back to 2925 BC.

Those records include extensively detailed tax rolls, listing things like harvest amounts, populations of villages, trade agreements with neighboring states and so on. What they don't include is a description of the year the entire kingdom was under water. They contain no mention of any flooding even remotely of that magnitude, only of normal, localized floods along the Nile.

The Sumerians and the proto-Elamites, similarly, have written records covering the entire period. Those of the Sumerians are similarly detailed concerning harvests and so forth, and again make no mention of any such deluge affecting them. We can't read those of the proto-Elamites, sadly, but they can be dated and they also show no indication of any universal calamity in the timeframe of the supposed flood.

Since there is no physical evidence whatsoever of such a remarkable flooding, and at least two major local civilizations failed to record it, the simplest explanation is that it never occurred.

Incidentally, the records of the Egyptians also make no note of the series of plagues which the God of the Hebrews supposedly visited upon them in the following book of the Bible - not even the deaths of the firstborn, which would have affected any number of inheritances, including that of the Pharoah's throne. Similarly, in the New Testament the Slaughter of the Innocents left no traces in the records of King Herod's tax collectors, and went unrecorded by any of the neighboring literate states, even the notably bureaucratic Romans.

This to say the least should cast doubt upon the historical reliability of the ancient Hebrew scribes.

Assessing likelihood, part 2

It's an inescapable part of being a parent that you worry about your child's health, physical and mental and emotional.

Being a freethinking parent in a society currently so saturated with Christian propaganda, I sometimes worry about whether my child will be able to keep his head clear of it. On the one hand I don't want to propagandize him myself, and on the other hand his mother prefers to take a noninterfering agnostic approach, but on the gripping hand there's never a shortage of people here in South Carolina willing to preach at the drop of a hat, or even just a pause in the conversation.

Anyway, my son and I were driving along and chatting. He was telling me about a video game he likes cslled Psychonauts, and mentioned that the lead character is named Razputin. (He's ten, and video games figure largely in his world.) Being the kind of Dad I am I took it as an opportunity to regale him with the tale of Rasputin. I explained how he became powerful in old Russia by convincing the Tsar and Tsarina that he could help their little boy survive his haemophilia (I explained what the disease was, and that it was incurable for the poor kid who'd been born with it) by using magic powers.

He wasn't having any of it. "Daddy, are you saying that was for real? You must be joking with me, right?" I assured him that it was true, and I could show him photographs of the people involved in my history books when we got home. He ruminated for a while, then told me he didn't care if it was in the history books, he still didn't believe it. "Magic isn't real, how could he make that boy better?"

I explained that I hadn't said that Rasputin really helped the boy, only that he claimed he could and the Tsar and Tsarina believed him. He thought about that a bit, then said, "Daddy, I still don't believe it. How could he even pretend good enough to make them believe him? The boy would still keep bleeding. It's ridiculous!" I shrugged and admitted that it seemed a bit hard to credit, but that the Tsar and Tsarina were so desperate and worried about their boy that they just believed Rasputin when he said he could help.

"Well, Daddy, I think that's wrong. I think maybe they just pretended to believe him, to make their little boy less scared."

A parent always worries about something, but I think I'm going to stop worrying about my boy's ability to think for himself! He certainly seems better equipped to assess relative robabilities than the average Christian.

Assessing likelihood, part 1

A new Barna group survey on how literally American take their Bible stories just came out.

To combine with the last Barna survey, amongst Christians:

75% believe a virgin got pregnant.
75% believe a dead guy rose from the grave.
69% believe water transformed into wine.
68% believe 5 loaves and 2 fish fed 5000 people.
65% believe a man overnighted with lions, uneaten.
64% believe water covered every mountain on Earth.
64% believe a sea opened to allow foot passage.
63% believe a boy killed a man using a slingshot.
60% believed a man walked on water.
60% believe the universe was created in 6 days.
56% believe in smooth-talking snakes.
49% believe strength can relate to hairstyle.

Two of these are easy enough even for a rationalist to believe; David used an unexpected weapon and was maybe a bit lucky, and maybe Daniel just didn't smell good to the lions.

A couple more could be considered 'stretchers' with a grain of truth; granting preternatural strength in the first place, it's possible to assign a psychological explanation to Samson's couture concerns, and a lot of people could be satisfied with a little food and a lot of goodwill on a one-time basis.

With a great deal of magnanimity, probably best obtained with the aid of large doses of ethanol, and a suitable disregard for the fine details of the stories, similarly obtained, one can allow for a couple more; talking snakes, while they don't appear to exist now, aren't actually incompatible with the physical laws of the Universe, and the antiquity of the Universe could be fudged a bit - rounding, you know.

That leaves seven stories which contain elements any normal rational person would consider flat-out violations of the natural laws of the Universe.

The odd thing is that the level of belief seems to have very little to do with the plausibility of the story. The Ultimate Catering Triumph of feeding five thousand people with one platter of fish sandwiches is considered less likely than pregnant virgins, ambulatory corpses, and an alcoholic's wet dream. It's considered more likely that a man could split an ocean with his mind, than that a boy could split a man's skull with a well-aimed rock.

I suppose we should be grateful that these people do consider that last story, about the superiority of ranged weapons, as being more likely than the one about guys perambulating the surface of large liquid volumes, but I still have to question their ability to assess relative probabilities.

Bear in mind that these are the folks who consider evolution by natural selection unlikely and difficult to believe.