This is the fifth part in the series An Evil God?
When you were a kid, and things didn’t go quite like you planned, did you ever throw a temper tantrum? Well then, believe it or not, you’re actually a lot like the God of the Bible.
Early in the book of Genesis, God throws the Tantrum of All Tantrums, and murders everyone on earth except for one small family.
All Evil, All the Time
Pullquote: They must have had some impressive concentration skills to be all evil, all the time.
I’m referring, of course, to the story of Noah’s Ark. God’s earth experiment didn’t turn out like he had hoped; he regretted making humans because they were so evil and violent. No one is sure what they were doing that was so evil — the story does not say — only that “every intention of the thoughts of [humanity's] heart was only evil continually.”
I don’t know about you, but that sounds a bit exaggerated to me. If everyone’s thoughts were evil at all times, how was anyone still alive? Wouldn’t they have been raping and killing and torturing each other? And didn’t anyone take a break from all their evil intentions long enough to think about what they were going to eat or maybe how to escape from that t-rex terrorizing the village?
They must have had some impressive concentration skills to be all evil, all the time.
The Wisdom of God
So everyone everywhere is evil. What will this regretful, all-powerful, all-knowing, yet loving god do about it? Perhaps teach them morality through a mandatory Sunday School class? Teach them the Golden Rule? Explain to them the concept of rule of law and justice? Give them a holy book with rules he expects them to live by? Turn the other cheek and repay evil with good?
Nah. He’s Yahweh! He’ll just kill everyone and start a clean slate. Or as he says in Bible, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.”
That’s a poetic way of saying, “Fuck it. I’m gonna drown all these evil bastards… and their children!”
An Old Man and His Boat
Pullquote: Creationists have to make the story make sense to themselves, and the story doesn’t make sense unless you add some more magic to it.
“Everyone” is a slight overstatement. A 600 year old man (uh huh, sure…) found favor with the Heavenly Murderer, who decides to save the old man and his family. God tells Noah to build a boat and put inside two pairs of every animal on the earth (six pairs of “clean” animals), along with enough food for the humans and the animals to live on for a year. How exactly a 600 year old man could build a boat larger than a modern cruise ship is not included in the story.
Now just think about this nonsense for a minute. We know there are about 1.4 million species on earth today — and scientists estimate that there are about 99 million species we don’t even know about. That’s an impossible amount of animals to fit in a boat.
Yet those are only the animals alive today. Most creationists believe that the species found in the fossil record were alive before the flood — 99.9% of which do not exist today. Let’s be very conservative and say there were 1 billion “pre-flood species.” That means they took 2 billion animals on a boat, along with enough food to feed everything for a year? How can anyone believe such an absurd thing?
It gets even crazier when you start to think about all the various animal needs. How did Noah get polar bears and what did he feed them? What about Dodo birds, or lizards, kangaroos, koalas, rain forest ants, elephants, wasps, roadrunners, and everything else? And of course there are the dinosaurs, which creationists think existed alongside man. All these animals were in different locations and have different needs in diet and climate.
When I’ve mentioned objections like this to creationists, they never say, “Hmm… that’s a good point, I can see why you would be skeptical.” Instead, they usually respond with “God can do anything” and their own harebrained theory — maybe God put everyone to sleep, maybe they just took baby animals, or any number of similar variations. My favorite response was from an acquaintance suggesting that God shrank all the animals and then brought them back to regular size after they got off the boat. At which point I realized there was absolutely no hope for that man.
The problem is they’re just making crap up that isn’t in the story. And if God wanted to do those things, why would he have given them such specific instructions, like to bring food for everything to eat? Why put them on a boat at all — why not just suspend them in the air and feed them manna? Or put magic air bubbles around them for the duration of the flood?
But I suppose creationists have to make the story make sense to themselves, and the story doesn’t make sense unless they add some more magic to it.
Back to the story. When all the animals are loaded up, God closes the door to the ark and sends a flood that kills all humans, animals, birds, and “creepy things” (good riddance!). It rains for 40 days and 40 nights, until even the mountains are covered. It takes a year for the water to disappear (where to is uncertain) and land to reappear.
Collateral Damage
Pullquote: If this God really exists, and the myth of Noah’s Ark actually happened, we would be in the hands of the most evil being imaginable.
When most rational beings encounter a problem, they do the best they can to fix it with as little collateral damage as possible. Contrast this to an undisciplined child. When a child encounters a problem, she smashes it and starts over.
Does this God sound like the most amazingly intelligent being in the universe, or more like an undisciplined child who smashes her fantasy world and tries again?
I don’t see how this ancient god can be any better than evil men like Hitler or Stalin. We think of them as the worst of the worst, yet the deeds of those men pale in comparison to God’s actions of killing everyone and everything on a planet.
If this God really exists, and the myth of Noah’s Ark actually happened, we would be in the hands of the most evil being imaginable.
Thank goodness we’re not.
Too bad we’re too stupid to make these critiques when we first hear these stories. We’re too busy trying to learn to count to ten.
Interesting addition and point to old testament theory. I can appreciate Christian social structure and behavior, and unfortunately when the bible and applied physics studies and theory come in side they tend not to mix. An assessment of Old Testament law would be a great subject for your next article.
And then they paint their nursery walls with cute little murals of Noah’s Ark, and put pictures and toys of the massacre everywhere. It’s one of the first stories kids learn in Sunday school. No wonder they’re so warped!
I have for the last few years always used the kid comparison when talking about the OT. That is what it seems like to me. Yeah I have run into many different defenses for how the animals were all collected. The main one I have heard is that before the flood the earth was one big landmass and that until the flood the animals would have easily been collected. Of course they have to throw their magic in to explain how all the different animals got to the different landmasses.
Wait–they find the idea of Pangea to be a logical explanation, but refuse to buy the fossil record that supports evolutionary theory (and not their magic woo-woo)? Oy.
I’ve linked to this before, but it seems on-topic once again: http://www.georgeleonard.com/yahweh.html
An interesting article, though I’m in no position to judge Leonard’s scholarship. However, I am so not buying the concept of a presexual boy of about 12. Heck, if a kid in the ancient world wasn’t already betrothed at that age, he was probably eying sheep speculatively.
Yeah, that’s not actually true. Short of nutritional problems delaying it, puberty has always happened at about the same age it does now. Except in very rare circumstances, a 12-year-old boy is pre-pubescent.
And as for actually being “betrothed”, there’s no evidence that the average person ever became pair-bonded before they were 16 or 18 or so. Yes, there were child marriages used to cement political alliances, but these have always been rare (by definition, they’re limited to members of the ruling minority), and polygamous societies sometimes allow adult men to marry pre-sexual girls, but never the other way around.
Admittedly, we have no direct evidence relating to this specific society, but it seems a little presumptuous to assume that their sexual politics were completely different from every other society on Earth, without that evidence.
I still can’t believe anyone in this day and age,
people can still buy in to this rubbish…!
It makes me want to shake them and shout “wake up, you sad monkey….!”
First, it’s good to see AEG back!
Second, I had a discussion with someone this week and finally boiled what I think down to a few sentences; a process aided, in part, by the AEG posts. It is:
“There are, according to the evidence, only to options concerning the existence of gods: Either gods do not exist or they are bastards that don’t deserve to be worshiped and praised”
Thirdly, just for a second I was going to take you to task for the T-Rex/village thing, but then I came to my senses and realized that it was a dig at the Creation Museum.
Atheist Comedy – The Great Flood
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I225Vcs3X0g
Another flaw in the reasoning behind the Flood, is that, after God had just gotten through trashing his first experiment and starting over, he also supposedly committed to never doing the same thing again … BEFORE having given it a chance to see if the second time worked.
This leaves one to ask why he didn’t just make the very same commitment at the start, and simply choose not to trash everything in the first place. If he could make that commitment after the Flood was over, he certainly could have made it before, and not allowed the Flood to happen at all.
Another note: The Genesis explanation for why God flooded the planet, is not really an explanation at all. “Every intention of the thoughts of [humanity's] heart was only evil continually” doesn’t even begin to explain it. The most glaring omission in this statement is, what was the nature of the evil that was in humanity’s collective heart? Was it truly “evil” … such as murderous mayhem? Or was it something innocuous that God decided to label as “evil”?
Since Genesis doesn’t say what, exactly, the “evil” was, we have no idea if the Flood was an acceptable response to it. We only have the label “evil,” which is really not enough to go on. I suppose Bible-thumpers are happy with this explanation, because for them, God calling something “evil” means it is “evil” and they’re not interested in what that “evil” was. But for the rest of us human beings with actual brains, and who use them, it’s insufficient.
Well, it is pretty clear what God was upset about: corruption and violence.
Gen 5:11 “The earth was corrupt before God , and…filled with violence.”
The corruption would most likely be linked to the topic introduced at the beginning of this chapter. Elicit sex between “sons of God” and humans, and the offspring thereof. The flood does seem to have succeeded in wiping out this mutant progeny.
The problem here is that it is still not clear what the “evil” is. Is it violence? If so, the Flood didn’t solve that problem, quite obviously, and God, as it turned out, was premature to have pledged, in Genesis 9:8-11, never to do anything like that again. Since the problem God was trying to solve via the Flood was not actually solved, this means his scheme didn’t actually work. As an explanation for what God was trying to do, therefore, this association fails completely.
Was it the existence of the “Nephilim,” to which you refer? That’s the position taken in 1 Enoch — that they had been an abomination that God could only wipe out by flooding the Earth — but although the Nephilim are mentioned in Genesis, no clear connection between them and the Flood exists … other than proximity. That is, Gen 6:4 ends with saying the Nephilim had been “mighty men who were of old, men of renown,” but Gen 6:5 begins, “Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth,” with nothing to show that the Nephilim had been connected to humanity’s wickedness. (The inference that the two are connected, may have inspired the author(s) of 1 Enoch to make this connection and state it overtly.)
No. It’s fairly clear still. “Before God” means “this is the stuff I have a problem with”: corruption, violence. Now he may have been hypocritical in the way he chose to deal with it; but that’s another issue. We can only guess what the “corruption” was. I’m guessing it was the nephilim because that’s what he begins this passage talking about. Not a stretch at all.
No, it’s still not “clear” at all. As I already explained, the idea that the evil God was purging by the Flood was “violence,” is obviated by the simple fact that the scheme didn’t actually work.
As for the Nephilim, referring to them as “men of renown” in one sentence, then complaining about humanity’s “wickedness” in the next, doesn’t even begin to establish any connection between the two. It is by no means obvious that the Nephilim were the source of the evil in humanity. If anything, mentioning them as “men of renown,” then talking about humanity’s wickedness, suggests the opposite … that they might have been the few who were the exception to that rule (i.e. that humanity was “wicked”), rather than the cause of it.
Again, the only association between them is proximity. The fact is that one can speak of one thing in one sentence, and something else in the next, without the two being connected in any way. The only documented, direct connection between the Flood and the Nephilim from ancient times is found in 1 Enoch, and that book is not canonical except to the Ethiopian Church … and as it turns out, modern Protestant evangelicals — to whom the Flood myth is so dear — do not belong to it.
You appear to want to have it both ways … saying that the nature of the “wickedness” was “violence” and that the Nephilim had caused it, but the bottom line is that neither supposition is borne out explicitly by Genesis. One can interpret it in, as you have, but that can only be based on supposition. Suppositions are necessarily extra-scriptural, though, which only leaves us wondering what the scriptures were referring to. As written, they remain unclear, as I said originally.
That’s it. I want to have it both ways. Bwa-ha-ha-ha- haaaa!
What really gets me about the story is that after it’s all over, after God has killed everyone except one family in order to wipe the slate clean, the plan doesn’t work. Noah and his family immediately begin sinning and in short order everything is exactly as it was before the flood, eventually requiring God to come down to Earth and kill himself in order to allow himself to forgive us.
The story paints omniscient God as a HUGE failure. And evangelicals LOVE it.
after God has killed everyone except one family in order to wipe the slate clean, the plan doesn’t work.
That’s what I find interesting about the story. It’s really a strange one, you know? God has this plan and humans screw it up so God wipes the slate clean and starts the plan over again and humans, apparently, screw it up again. The Israelites wouldn’t have had a problem with this because to them Yahweh wasn’t an all-powerful ruler of the universe – he was their tribal/national god, and he had power over them, but not over the whole world. It’s only once the concept of God got infested with Persian and Hellenistic influences that we have the problem of reconciling stories about a powerful yet not omnipotent national god with the concept of an All Powerful Lord Of The Universe.
I’d like to read it as a metaphor except that I know the rationale for the flood from the Mesopotamian sources, which surely had to influence the myths in Genesis. The gods were pissed because humans made too much noise so they decided to wipe them out to shut them up. One of them (Enki, I think) doesn’t want to see humanity wiped out so he goes and tells one family to prepare for a huge flood. The gods wipe out humanity except for this one ship and Enki somehow forces them to never do it again. But then that story doesn’t fit with the concept of monotheism. As it is it seems more like a story that was kept because it was well known, or to show how powerful and vengeful God could be, rather than as a metaphor for anything deeper than that.
When the neighbors play loud music on sunday morning when you try to sleep late can definitly turn a dude homicidal.
It does seem rather suspicious that christianity allows for forgiveness and absolution. God was malicious and spiteful but now he really understands we just want to get into heaven for free, so we made it so that’s what he said. God didn’t used to love people and now he does. God used to kill sinners and now we have arranged for him not to do that. Seems rather convenient.
So god is just like the Beowulf monster, Grendel, in wanting to shut the noisy humans up.
’99 million undiscovered species’ seems ridiculously high. What you’re essentially saying there is that we have discovered less than 2% of all species on Earth (which would be a woefully inadequate figure for a species that itself lives on 25-30% of the planet, and intentionally explores the other 70-75%.), and I’m confident the percentage we’ve discovered is a fair bit higher than that. Can you check this figure? I’ve heard much more reasonable estimates of 1-2 million undiscovered species.
As far as I know my figure is correct. Feel free to fact-check though, I’m happy to make corrections if I’m wrong.
How would you know that most are beetles if they aren’t discovered yet? Why not bacteria, or copepods? For the most part these kinds of estimates are bullshit. Biologists tend to wildly overestimate how many species there are and how many are going extinct. You can track the number of large species, like birds, that have gone extinct and it’s way below estimates derived from these overblown numbers.
Mind you, most of those are beetles. God, if he exists, sure has a hard on for beetles.
Benjamin,
Every time a deep dive takes place, an average of five new species is found. We know less about the deep sea than we do about the moon – and the deep sea accounts for a huge percentage of Earth’s biomass.
This is definitely one of those stories that I questioned when I was younger. I was told that “the whole world” might mean the whole KNOWN world (to Moses, the writer) and “two of every animal” meant two of every KNOWN animal (to Moses). As far as I can tell, that kind of makes sense, but it’s not what the story says and definitely not what most people believe. If you have to make concessions and read into these stories so much to make them make any sense, that’s probably not a good sign.
That make absolutely no sense. As creationists keep telling us all life was created at one time and everything that live today has existed since god created the world. Since the bible claim that anything that wasn’t on the ark have drowned then if your version of the story was true then we should only have animals that could be found in the middle east during the bronze age alive in the world today, which is obviously not the case. Any way even if you gave the story that discount there is still no way you will be able to fit the animals with enough food for a week let alone a year into the ark.
So are all the people who dies in the flood eligible to be “saved” by Jesus? Theologically, that is the big hole in the story.
Man was fallen since the Garden and so God had a plan to save everyone via Jesus. So it’s not like there was any less sin in the world either before or after the flood. The whole “flood the sinning lot of mankind” is theologically stupid in light of a coming savior who is supposed to be saving all the sinners anyway!
The “real” myth is better — and fun to read
The building of a great ship and weathering a “universal” deluge was accomplished by Unapishtim (sometimes, Utnapishtim) and his family, as told in The Epic of Gilgamesh, 4500 years ago.
The myth in the so-called sacred texts of judaism and xianity is nothing but a very late, very corrupted understanding of far earlier Sumerian texts.
And by the logic of faith-based pseudo-reasoning, Enki, Inanna, Utu are among the real gods. The gods of Sumer “existed” before Abraham left Ur. (The goddess of war and sex, Inanna is a far better object of reverence than any androcentric, paternalistic, misogynist bearded divine child abuser.)
If you don’t know the great epic myths of Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu; then, you’ll never see how later religions, Judaism, Xianity, and Islam are derivative late-comers.
You will read about a world so much healthier than the one inhabited by sin-soaked xian puritans, those revenge seeking, slum-dwellers of the Eastern Roman Empire.
anti_supernaturalist
Another gaping hole in the plot of the bible: much is made of the different characteristics of the lineages of Cain and Abel, yet none of that should even matter is everyone was wiped out in the flood except Noah and his family.
Yep. Likewise, it makes no sense that Cain receives a mark that warns people not to kill him, at a time where the entire population of Earth consists of Cain, Adam, and Eve.
The plausible explanation is that the Cain and Abel myth was taken from another context (the story explains the early Israelite tribe’s relationship with other tribes, using the characters of the story as representatives of ther tribes). It was woven into the Eden myth, and the editors either didn’t realize the anachronistic errors this introduced, or they simply didn’t see it as a big deal. It might be that they actually recognized the stories for the myths they are, unlike modern day fundies.
Not to mention the fact that god punish cain to wander the land and in the very next sentence (Gen 4:16) he settle down with his wife (where the *&(^ did she come from) and establish a city.
You know, I completely missed that. It’s like Michael Bay wrote the Bible.
Everythingocide just isn’t as catchy as genocide.
At least gerbils got what they deserved.
lol.
Oh, I really like the artwork in the image you have posted at the top! Mind if I ask where it’s from?
A friend created it for the article.
Nice.
Mark Twain’s comments on this biblical story in “Letters From the Earth” are priceless. My favorite part is when the germs in the bowels of Noah’s Family sing hymns of praise to God about constipation.
The ark story also demonstrates that god invents and supports incest. First the Adam & Eve family had to pair off. Brothers with Sisters. Sons with Mothers. Daughters with Fathers. Maybe this is where that “original plan” went wrong!
And then god does it again with Noah. One family responsible for re-populating the Earth. It makes Big Love seem like The Waltons.
For an omniscient being, god, at the very best, appears to be a slow learner.
It was the etch-a-sketch end of the world!
Daniel, it boils down to one simple fact: you can’t argue with stupid.
Well, I can. I just can’t win. :D
And god chose to save Noah, knowing that later Noah would get drunk, naked and expose his junk to his grandson.
Noah placed each species on a raft of grass with a sail and then god farted them to the correct locations to trick us into believing in evolution. Got it.
Oops just noticed where this comment came up and I was hitting the reply button above the correct comment.
You can really throw a stick in the spokes of a creationist’s bike by asking them how almost all of the world’s marsupials came to rest almost perfectly on the opposite side of the world on the same isolated land mass.
They do like to invoke their “floating rafts of grass” theory for kangaroos, but they forget koalas, wombats, thylacines (Tassie tigers), quolls, numbats, bandicoots, bilbies, marsupial mice, tree kangaroos, possums, and many other marsupials, plus their close cousins the monotremes: platypuses and echidnas. All of these closely related creatures ended up on the same continent and almost nowhere else on the entire planet.
Follow up that stick with this Ewok-launched log: if fossils were made in the Great Flood, then how is it that all of these marsupials and monotremes ended up floating back to the precise landmass where fossils of their giant progenitors can exclusively be found: diprotodons and their ilk (wombats the size of minibuses), thylacaleo (a marsupial “lion” the size of a jaguar), a huge carnivorous kangaroo, and so on.
Do they seriously expect us to believe that these creatures lived only in Australia (or, even more ridiculously, the Flood washed their bones from the Middle East to rest exclusively on one landmass on the other side of the world) and then, by complete coincidence, their descendants that were saved by Noah all ended up floating across the planet and settled in the very same place?
Seriously?
I’m all for civil discourse, but anyone who believes any of that is an idiot.
The far simpler and more plausible explanation is, of course, that they never left. Isolated by ocean, Australia’s marsupials were never defeated by their placental cousins and remained there while their relatives all but died out in the rest of the world.
When it comes to Occam’s Razor, there’s a reason God is always depicted with a beard. :)
I hope you are going to cover Lot and his family being in Sodom. Specifically the part where the men want to have sex with the visitors (angels disguised as men) and Lot (who is, by Yahweh’s standards, godly and righteous) basically says, “No, don’t touch them, here f*** my daughters instead!”
How Christians can say atheists are immoral is beyond me!
My girlfriend, after reading this story from Genesis, asked me, “Well, what about all the fish and other sea creatures?” I guess Yahweh gave them a free pass, eh?
It never even occurred to me, being familiar with the story all these years.
Well, God loves shellfish… he even prohibits us from eating them.
Question: if god is omnipotent, why didn’t he simply make people behave the way he wished?
what would be the purpose of freedom of choice, and in fact all higher corticcal functions???
sorry, that’s cortical!!
Thank you so very much for these fascinating articles. I have always used the Flood as my argument against Born again Christians and Jehova’s Witnesses who stop me in the street spouting their naive rubbish. I tell them that Hitler was a saint in comparison to their God and that even if their fairy tales were true I would rather go to Hell than to sit at the right side of an even greater mass murderer. They always say that God wanted a perfect world for his children and needed to chastise them when they were disobedient. I tell them that I am a vegetarian and a pacifist and abhor all violence so would never support their violent and evil god.