The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (25 page)

Not all localities, however, gave rise to flood stories. European flood traditions were rare outside of Greece and Scandinavia. Frazer thought it remarkable that he could not find a Chinese tradition that told of a universal inundation that killed off most of the human race. Neither could he find clear cases of native flood stories in Egypt or the rest of Africa. The lack of flood stories from along the Nile—where the annual flood is quite predictable—ruled out typical river flooding as a general source of flood myths. Droughts were the real danger in ancient Egypt and along most other major African rivers where it was failure to flood that would have been catastrophic.

Frazer suggested that while Christian missionaries almost certainly introduced some flood stories, many indigenous flood stories were rooted in attempts to explain marine fossils on mountaintops or in other high places. Missionaries delighted in describing how, like Saint Augustine, native peoples around the world pointed to shells or whalebones found high on mountainsides as proof of an ancient flood.

Given the rich variety of storylines and local detail, Frazer could not see how all the world’s flood traditions could be derived from the biblical story. In contrast, Frazer thought it was easy to see how local stories of catastrophic floods would evolve into stories of a universal deluge.

On the whole, then, there seems to be good reason for thinking that some and probably many diluvial traditions are merely exaggerated reports of floods which actually occurred, whether as the result of heavy rain, earthquake-waves, or other causes. All such traditions, therefore, are partly legendary and partly mythical: so far as they preserve reminiscences of floods which really happened, they are legendary; so far as they describe universal deluges which never happened, they are mythical.
⁸

After Frazer’s exhaustive study, only those uncritically seeking to legitimize a global flood gave any credence to the argument that the global distribution of flood stories meant they shared a common origin.

Those still trying to argue that the global distribution of flood stories is a legacy of a global flood have to consider how the rich collection of Chinese flood stories has very different storylines from Mesopotamian flood stories. Historian Mark Lewis’s
The Flood Myths of Early China
relates how the storylines and themes of Chinese flood stories are strikingly different from those at the roots of Western culture in presenting prevention of the flood as a human triumph. They do not tell of divine vengeance and human frailty but demonstrate how human labor can overcome nature.

Interpretations of Chinese flood stories point to their use as effective sanctions for traditions, laws or institutions in describing the construction of order from the chaos of a universal flood. In some versions, those who caused the flood are described as hooligans challenging the proper order of things. Such stories provided a charter for early imperial institutions, relating how the flood dissolved the distinctions between different classes of men—with disastrous consequences. Some versions of Chinese flood stories focus on failed attempts to impound the floodwaters, emphasizing the importance of flood control, which, in turn, helped justify the authority of rulers who maintained the all-important levees.

The savior-hero Yu is the central figure of Chinese flood myths dating as far back as 1000
BC
. He drained lowland floodwaters so that the fields could be planted and dredged rivers so that they could be channeled to the sea. This divided the world (China) into natural provinces. In one version, Yu is described as the minister of works who “stabilized the water and land,”
⁹
setting the stage for the arrival of agriculture and the development of Chinese civilization. His work is credited with allowing people to “descend from the hills and dwell in the fields,”
¹⁰
something that parallels how Chinese society moved from the eroded uplands on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau down to farm the fertile floodplains.

One version of the story holds that in the time of the flood the world was covered by wild grasses and forests inhabited by birds and wild animals. Taming the floodwaters allowed for the domestication of crops and the expansion of human settlement, bringing order to the land. These accounts of subduing nature’s chaos sound like draining swampy lowlands to transform wild land into farmland. The contrast with Mesopotamian stories of a killer flood sent by a vengeful god is striking.

Deciphering the origin of many flood stories is complicated because the biblical story may have hybridized with native legends. Noah’s story is one of the most colorful in the Bible and would have impressed people with a flood tradition of their own. But because missionaries were often the first to record local stories, it can be hard to tell whether a flood story predates Christian contact or just regurgitates Noah’s story with local color added.

Anthropologist Alice Lee Marriott inadvertently discovered how rapidly stories can jump from one culture to another while collecting Native American folklore in South Dakota in the summer of 1936. One day an elderly informant challenged her to tell him one of her people’s tales. She told him a version of Beowulf as the story of a brave warrior and the water monster. Afterwards, she was impressed with how he rounded out details to improve the story in retelling it to his people. A few years later Marriott was amused to find her story as the subject of a research paper in an ethnological journal documenting a Beowulf-like myth among Native Americans.

A century before, in 1842, a missionary named Moffat told the tale of how he could not find a flood legend among South Africans until one of the Khoikhoi (whom colonists called Hottentots) told him the story of a great flood. The man assured Moffat that this was a tale of his forefathers, and that Moffat was the first missionary he had ever met. Later, in comparing notes with another missionary, Moffat learned that his colleague had indeed told his native informant the story of Noah’s Flood. This shows how difficult it is to determine the origin of many flood myths due to the potential for unrecorded cultural transmissions.

Unsurprisingly, people living in flood-prone estuaries are likely to have stories of a great flood. The estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers receives its water from the mountains of Turkey and Iraq, and a warm spring rainstorm falling onto a heavy snow pack can submerge the whole floodplain under many feet of water. When the levees burst there is nowhere to go as everything slips under water. Every now and then people living in this region were forced to flee to higher ground or pack their possessions and animals onto a boat or raft as their world sank beneath floodwaters. The lack of well-documented flood myths from Egypt and the Nile River may be due to the fact that the Nile gets its water from sources far to the south in equatorial Africa. Fed by a chain of great lakes in the East African Rift, the river’s annual discharge does not vary anywhere near as much as in Mesopotamia. The predictably moderate annual flood was no threat, it was the source of life.

How long could stories of a great flood survive oral transmission from one generation to the next? Examples of stories that have been passed down through oral transmission for thousands of years have been reported from several continents. My favorite is a Klamath Indian story, recorded in 1865. It provides a compelling eyewitness account of the eruption of Mount Mazama, which formed Oregon’s Crater Lake more than 7,600 years ago. For tens of thousands of years, our preliterate ancestors conveyed knowledge from one generation to the next through oral traditions. For a story to survive retelling over many generations it has to be viewed as important, it must continue to have relevance or relate to something still visible to listeners, and it must be highly memorable. Stories of a great flood satisfy all three criteria, particularly in flood-prone regions.

Upon reflection, my theory that flood stories from around the world are grounded in reality is plausible. For tens of thousands of years, oral traditions were the only means of transmitting information from one generation to the next. And while not all stories bear retelling, tales of disastrous, displacing floods were sure to be retold for generations. Just think of your own family’s lore. It’s not the day-to-day events that get passed on, it’s the big, memorable things.

After the devastating blows to flood geology in the first half of the nineteenth century, geologists increasingly avoided debates over how to account for the biblical flood. The educated consensus was that just because it was written for an audience with a Mesopotamian knowledge of earth science didn’t mean that the Book of Genesis wasn’t written to convey the majesty, scope, and power of creation.

By the end of the nineteenth century, mainstream geologists had lost interest in the Deluge. It was a settled matter. Noah’s Flood was widely seen as a local historical event in the Middle East, even if its precise nature remained debatable.

Thomas Huxley, the last survivor of the generation of prominent scientists who lived through the battles over Lyell’s and Darwin’s work, even wrote an essay arguing that a global deluge inundating the world was a fable that conflicted with geological evidence. He recalled the century’s changes in the relation between geology and Christianity:

At the present time, it is difficult to persuade serious scientific inquirers to occupy themselves, in any way, with the Noachian Deluge. They look at you with a smile and a shrug, and say they have more important matters to attend to… . But it was not so in my youth. At that time, geologists and biologists could hardly follow to the end of any path of inquiry without finding the way blocked by Noah and his ark, or by the first chapter of Genesis; and it was a serious matter, in this country at any rate, for a man to be suspected of doubting the literal truth of the Diluvial… history.
¹¹

Huxley virtually credits Lyell with single-handedly creating the science of geology, ignoring the contributions of Buckland, Sedgwick, and others who also struggled with and turned against the idea of a global flood. Perhaps Huxley relegated them to the background because of their membership in the clergy, the villains of his story. Huxley’s portrayal of a century-long battle between Lyell’s rationalism and blind faith in a catastrophic global flood fostered the perception of an ages-old war between Christianity and science.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, geologists were almost entirely uniformitarians. Lyell’s dictate that the present was the key to the past had become geological dogma. A growing body of geological evidence and alternative explanations for Siberian mammoth carcasses effectively dismantled the remaining fragments of a case for a global deluge as the primary driving force in earth history. But over the course of the twentieth century, the rise of flood geology proponents among evangelical Christians fostered the view that geology and faith—science and religion—could not peacefully coexist. Instead of trying to refine their understanding of the biblical flood story in light of new knowledge, radically conservative Christians broke with those who acknowledged scientific findings and began to ignore, selectively cherry-pick, and actively undermine science to support their favorite literal interpretation of the Bible. Today, we know them as creationists.

10

Dinosaurs in Paradise

W
HEN
I
HEARD THAT
the new Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, featured exhibits showing people picnicking with dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, I had to see it. Nothing could have prepared me for a dinosaur-petting-zoo version of natural history. Upon entering, I was greeted by a diorama showcasing a velociraptor straight out of
Jurassic Park
calmly standing beside Eve while she feeds a squirrel.

Visitors pass a ticket checker dressed up as a Park Ranger stationed at a Grand Canyon National Park sign, then navigate a fake bedrock canyon designed to enthrall kids and arrive at a large two-panel board that addresses the issue of the age of the universe. The left-hand side says that reason holds the universe to be billions of years old. The right-hand side indicates that God says that it all began six thousand years ago. So which should we believe—reason or God, the creator of reason?

I was prepared for unusual perspectives, but one of the next panels caught me off guard by endorsing evolution. Its diagrams illustrated several versions of the tree of life to contrast the scientific view with the creationist view of what really happened. Alongside the conventional portrayal of life evolving from single-celled organisms to modern flora and fauna, the display illustrated how a limited number of species in God’s original “creation orchard” started branching into new species before Noah’s Flood. Afterward, some, like dinosaurs, went extinct, while their luckier peers rapidly flowered into modern species. The diagram for humans stood out as a simple straight line, showing no change from Creation to the present.