Flooded with Floods

 

The following vignette was taken from the January/February Solid Ground edition which can be found here.  

In a debate on the existence of God, well-known skeptic Michael Shermer attempted to discredit the biblical account of the flood by citing a similar Sumerian account written much earlier than Moses’ record. Many other cultures have flood stories in their mythologies, Shermer pointed out. Therefore, he reasoned, all are myths.

It made me think of winter in Chicago, where I grew up. When the snow begins to fall, kids might hear their grandfathers talk about the great blizzard of ’67. Some will hear about four days of storm with drifts five feet high. Others will hear of a snowstorm that lasted a week and buried whole houses.

When boys compare their grandfathers’ tales, do you think they conclude that old timers just have a habit of making up yarns about blizzards? I suspect not. They probably figure their grandads ramble on about the blizzard of ’67 because it snowed pretty hard that winter. It did. I was there.

It’s true that virtually every major culture has a flood story in its folklore. It’s curious, isn’t it, that there aren’t any worldwide fire myths or global hailstone tales mixed in. Everybody talks about the flood, though. Maybe the best explanation is that there really was a flood of such magnitude that it kept people talking for thousands of years, even though some of the details got mixed up in the retelling.

I think we owe thanks to Michael Shermer for pointing out all the corroborating evidence for a worldwide flood.

God Bless,