Question about the Genesis Flood

A reader writes:

A protestant friend of mine has been reading Genesis with his protestant glasses, and we have started to discuss some of his thoughts.  Neither of us know anything about science except what we have forgotten from grade school.

I know the Church does not have an official teaching on what, if any, ‘science’ there is in Genesis, so we are free to believe any scientific theory we think plausible.  I believe Genesis was never meant to be an attempt at science and should not be treated that way.  It is basically a story to tell us some profound truths about God and ourselves – He made the world, He made it good, He made us, we were made in His image & likeness, we sinned and lost paradise.

My friend tells me this:

Yes, I believe the flood was worldwide and it was a cataclysmic event. The theory that I think is the most credible, is before the Great Flood, there wasn’t any rain and that the earth was watered through underground reservoirs of water and mists from above and below. The flood was caused by this water canopy collapsing from above and these water reservoirs exploding from below. This event would have created most of the mountains and the oceans and such places as The Grand Canyon. It does boggle my mind that it could have rained forty days and nights, but I still believe it. Biblically, Noah and his family were on the ark for about a year. That’s how long it took the water to recede. I believe that all of the continents were connected until a short time after the flood.

I personally think this is beyond ridiculous… we simply would have evidence of something like that happening.  I asked him what scientific source he read this theory in, and he pointed me to John Rice’s Biblical Commentary on Genesis.

So of course I thought, “What does Mark Shea have to say about Science and Genesis?”  I found surprisingly little when I did a search on your website.  Can you point me to an article or two where you might address this topic?  I don’t believe the great flood was world-wide, and I don’t think the human race started with Adam and Eve’s children all committing incest with each other… but I’m open to any argument you might have to the contrary.

I beg you for your thoughts!

I’m not much use here.  My own take on the Flood story is that the primary interest of the author of Genesis is to draw spiritual lessons from a story that was already taken for granted in his culture (and indeed in countless cultures around the world).  My tendency is to assume that when a historical, indeed, practically a racial memory of something like a primordial flood disaster has impressed itself on the memory of cultures all around the world, the likelihood is that Something, rather than nothing, lies at the root of that memory.  Given that we have copious documentation on sundry massive floods in the areas of Mesopotamia and, in particular, the Black Sea  I think it is quite on the cards that a small human population would retain memories of what, for them, would have been world ending disaster and spread out from there carrying that story (with all the normal embroidery and exaggeration that goes with such ancient tales) to the ends of the earth.

Among the peoples who carry that story forward out of the mists of prehistory are the Jews.  And in accordance with their mission as the Chosen People, their mythology is the Chosen Mythology.  So the bring to bear on the story a perspective that brings both the moral and covenantal imperatives of the revelation they bear to the world.  The Flood thus becomes in their telling, a story of judgment for wickedness (in sharp contrast to their neighbor’s telling in the Enuma Elish, which sees it as capricious gods rubbing out the noisy human neighbors downstairs. (I discuss some of this in Making Senses Out of Scripture.)  It also is retold as a Re-Creation event in which a new world emerges from the waters of the deep, while the Man again finds himself in a Garden where he again consumes a fruit that again redounds to a curse against future generations.  In that, both the creation and fall mirror Israel’s own experience in the Exodus, which is again a salvation through water followed by the sin of the Golden Calf.

I don’t think there’s a lot of point in trying to nail down the exact historical details of the Flood.  As you note, the Church certainly does not demand it.  I think it’s folly to complete deny a historical basis for it.  But I think the main thing to pay attention to is how the author makes use of the pre-existing and already ancient story in order to get across the points he wants to make, which are deeply moral, theological and spiritual and far more profound than the same story as told by his Sumerian neighbors.

As to reconciling the Genesis account of human origins and the evidence of the sciences, I highly recommend Mike Flynn’s delightful essay “Adam and Eve and Ted and Alice” .