/r/Christianity is a subreddit to discuss Christianity and aspects of Christian life. All are welcome to participate.
I brought it up in a different thread, and many people said they did not believe it happened. How can you be a Christian and not believe what the Bible says?
Sort by:
Best
Open comment sort options
Best
Top
New
Controversial
Old
Q&A
The theological lessons are real, but ancient authors were known to build composite characters and telescope events for narrative purposes, similar to how movies are sometimes based on real events.
Time to build a religion based on the movie "noah"?
I was thinking more Evan Almighty
That one was at least enjoyable in some way if I remember correctly 🤣
Star Wars and the Big Lebowski both have their own religions. It happens.
What's the lesson? That humans deserve death?
I think it's real, but that we need to understand it through the perspective of the ancient near eastern culture in which it was written. We can't read it as if it's a modern science textbook.
So what do you think actually happened then, what aspects were too complex to relate to the ancient near eastern culture? If it was a more local flood I'm pretty sure that could've been expressed in Hebrew:
So is the flood itself more abstract? Is "all life" and "all the peoples of Earth" not literal, somehow?
I do think it was a regional flood as we would understand it today. But to the people of that culture and time period it was the entire world that was known to them.
Don't you think that the story makes it clear several times in several ways that this is a worldwide flood and will wipe out life from the surface? And that's not from a human perspective- the story has GOD saying he will do this.
So if there was a flood that wasn't worldwide, I don't see how we can reasonably say the story is true.
The main problem with the local flood is, why not just walk to a safe place. Why build a boat? It's more work than just walking to another country.
Local doesn't necessarily mean Small. So, in the 1887 Chinese floods, almost a million people died in just the initial flooding. I don't think that asking "why didn't those million people just walk to a safe place?" is terribly helpful, any more than asking "and why didn't the other million who died of starvation in the aftermath just walk to somewhere there was food?" would be.
I presume that some, around the edges, did walk to somewhere safe, and I presume that many more walked to somewhere that was initially safer, but became cut off then overwhelmed as the waters rose.
Noah's ark is based on an ancient Sumerian story. A rather large population lived in the marshes at the mouth of Euphrates river, a large boat would provide a modicum of safety.
That isn't always possible (hence people die in floods, sometimes in their thousands). Water can move extremely fast and if you're somewhere low lying, you're done for.
220000 people died in the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, for instance.
The people of the time likely thought the flood affected the whole world
is there proof of the boat? also a local flood can still be enormous, as in dozens of square kilometers
But if the word is truly the word of God’s, then it shouldn’t be an error due to a human’s perspective though, no?
The Bible isn't the Word, Jesus is. If you require the Bible to be perfect, then you put your faith in it, not in God. The Bible does not claim to be a perfect record of fact, that's something evil men say about it to justify ignoring the things Jesus taught in favor of the things men taught about him, and to identify and oppress people within their sphere of influence who use their God given gift to think critically about His creation.
A few chapters later we get a list of "all the peoples of the earth" which leaves out a bunch of peoples. So yeah.
Yeah man. In the Bible "the whole world" means the world that was known to them at the time. It's not talking about Australia or North and South America.
I know some people argue that "the earth" in Genesis doesn't refer to the whole world. Idk how much water that argument holds though.
I see what you did there. At the very least, it would seem that the "world" in the story would include the mountains of Urartu, which reach about 17,000 feet above sea level.
If a flood is big enough to cover the mountains of Urartu, the waters have risen high enough to cover 99.9% of the whole world. I have trouble seeing how that would be a "regional" flood.
there weren't any Israelites at that time
Abraham is the first jew
Israelites weren’t Israelites until Jacob had his 12 sons. What Bible are you quoting from?
people-in-Noah's area, then. Is it ever specified where Noah lived pre-flood? I just assumed he lived in the vague Israel area.
Anyway point being: if the flood was more local, the Bible's authors could've specified that without confusion, and had no particular reason to exaggerate when the same theological lessons apply to a more localized flood.
You should read the book of Genesis first before you presume yourself capable of commenting correctly. Noah and the flood predate Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Therefore, there were NO wicked Israelites, just wicked people descended from Adam.
You're right you're right, that was sloppy of me. Replace "Israelites" with "the peoples of Noah's nation" then.
Where did the water go afterwards? Just wondering
A lot of religions from that area have stories of a giant flood. I believe that a giant flood did happen, it was just exaggerated a bit for story telling purposes
If I'm reading right, Mt. Ararat's south face where they say Noah landed, would be the northern most origin of the Euphrates as it feeds the Murat the Euphrates main tributary.
So if the ancient Hebrews left Mesopotamia after a nasty local flood and followed the river north that's where they end up before heading west to Haran where Abraham's father settled, before Abraham went on further to the Jordan Valley. Seems plausible.
People sure are finding someone interesting ways to phrase the word "no"
So in short, "no"
More like „well yes but actually no.“ but if I were to pick one it would be no
The Great Schism of 2024
Well a national flood is plausible and able to fit in scripture. Scripture isn’t even describing a world wide flood, hyperbole and other literary tactics are used.
A giant flood did happen. The
PacificAtlantic Ocean flooded into the Mediterranean basin.This would have been around the time humans appeared, around 6 million years ago.
Even more pertinent is how did rainbows not exist before the flood? What were the laws of physics like to *not* make rainbows exist until God made them appear?
Holy shit why didn't I ever think about this lol
I’ve heard: “It didn’t rain before the flood because the firmament held back the waters in the sky. This also reduced .. radiation? Which is why everyone lived so much longer. Then the firmament broken open and thus began the hydrological cycle.” Don’t ask me any questions
I have heard this too. Basically, it in my mind was like a “ bubble” around the earth?
Woah where did you hear that?
The narrative of Noah's ark (which i personally take to be a myth with a historical core) informs us that:
Humanity is sinful, and without God's intervention, will sink deeper and deeper into depravity and wickedness.
2. God is holy. He cannot stand sin, and His justice demands that it must be punished.
3. We are called, like Noah, to be righteous and obey God even though it goes against the grain of culture and may not always make logical sense (like building a huge-ass boat in the middle of the land and nowhere near the sea).
4. If we will do no.3, we can have the privilege of playing an active and willing role in His plans and purposes to save and redeem the world.
5. Also, by having faith in God and obeying Him, we will be able to see His saving work in our own lives and the lives of those closest to us.
6. Even the best and most righteous of us still have that tendency to fall into sin (like Noah went and got blind drunk after the flood receded and they were back on dry land). We need a Saviour.
7. It would be pointless for God to press the reset button, to destroy the world and begin anew. The story of Noah tells us that God has tried that, and it does not solve the problem of sin in the human heart.
I would suggest that those of our Christian brothers and sisters who "do not believe that Noah, the ark, and the flood were real" would still affirm and uphold these seven biblical truths. In this way, although they do not agree with you about the way that this narrative should be understood and interpreted, they continue to "believe what the Bible says."
And many American Christians believe that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but was not God (see e.g. results here). I continue to accept their claim to be Christians (followers of Jesus) and to "believe what the Bible says", particularly since Trinitarianism isn't developed with clarity in the Bible text.
Not believing that Jesus is God is simply disobedience to the word of God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made … The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1-3,14). “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through Him and for Him” (Colossians 1:15-16). The Creator of all things on earth and in Heaven, by definition, IS God.
If you can write out the actual meaning of Noah's ark...why doesn't the Bible do that? Why write something that, 2000 years later, would split countries over the question of its fundamental reality?
Regarding #3, how exactly are we to obey God? How do we know when we are and aren't obeying God?
The Bible is supposed to be inerrant, but if we're admitting that much of it is figurative and open to interpretation, then we're just cherry-picking our morals.
Of course we do that already! I think we can all agree obeying God's word as written in Deuteronomy or Leviticus would be immoral today. We can't go around stoning people to death. But if we take those laws figuratively and interpret them how we see fit, then we are inherently obeying our own rules, not God's.
So I have to ask. Why doesn't God hit the reset button on humanity? If he hates sin, it makes no sense to create a sinful human race that he knew would require him to sacrifice himself to himself in order to save us from his own judgement. Why not start fresh and create Adam and Eve again without the capacity for sin?
Because, as you established, we have to take Genesis figuratively. God didn't literally create us. He didn't create the universe in a literal 7-day period. He was just the one responsible for the big bang. Seems he may not have the power to hit the reset button or the power to create man without the capacity for sin.
Maybe what the Bible and the New Testament are really teaching us is that we have the capacity to either save or destroy ourselves. We can be our own savior. Maybe we are God.
I know that sounds ludicrous, but if we're reading things figuratively, then that notion isn't out of line.
We need to stop doing mental gymnastics and admit the Bible is hot garbage.
Everyone sees some parts of the Bible as figurative. The Bible is particularly full of parables. They aren't intended to be read as histories. That's a mistaken modern bias.
Whether or not the flood happened doesn't make the Bible right or not. It is the message that is important. That is why the Bible exists. It is not a history. It is not a science textbook. It is a guide to eternal salvation, which explains why it is so full of figurative language and parable and so on. Eternal salvation is a tough thing to explain in literal terms. So God used stories to guide us. Those stories being fiction or nonfiction don't actually matter. Like at all. That's looking for the wrong thing. Look for salvation, not a history of men.
Even that's not quite 100% true, since parts of the Bible are historical. The hard part is figuring out which parts are and which are poetic or allegorical.
Well, no, it definitely isn't a "mistaken modern bias", as ancient Jews and ancient Christians thought the story of Noah's flood was meant to be read as history.
At the very minimum, the message must be “at a certain point, God steps in and egregiously punishes humanity for its sin,” no?
When the Philippian jailor asked Paul what to do to be saved, Paul didn't say, "Believe Noah and the Ark are true," did he?
Thats not what OP asked
I do believe it is real. If I was challenged, I probably can't defend my reasoning because I just don't have enough knowledge on the subject. But I do have faith that the word of God is true, and so I have to stand on that for my reasoning.
So this must means you believe Deuteronomy 7 and other similar passages also accurately reflect the nature of Yahweh? Genocide,ethnic cleansing, and infanticide were acceptable according to Yahweh. He killed innocent people as a means to an end multiple times including Noah’s flood, the firstborn of Egypt.
username checks out I guess
Yup, pretty much. 😉
Random counter points: A bout of those dimensions purely made from wood is not sea worthy, we tried and it didn't work. If magic is the solution, why build a boat and not just magic them a stand on water spell.
If the story is literally true the 8 ish people would need like 20h a day just to shovel shit from the ship.
Of all the animals or kinds or whatever in existence far from all have been found to radiate out from the middle east as a literal noahs arc prophecy would suggest
a global flood and a boat with all the animals? how in the world can one even consider that as real.
I’ve struggled with this a lot. I’m not sure how every species of insect made it onto the ark
This doesn't seem hard to me.
Beavers are North American and if the story is true and God got them to the ark, that took some supernatural intervention.
If God can get the beavers on the ark he can get a bunch of bugs on the ark, and get them to behave.
And by that logic, we could’ve done it all last Thursday and wiped our memories about it…
The way I want to say this is that all of the concerns about Noah's ark are assuaged if you just say it's magic, and all arguments that the ark is impossible are just moot if you say it's magic. I'm reluctant to use the word though because I don't want to sound derisive.
I don't know why Christians ever bother to entertain the idea that the flood and the animal migrations and anything else about this happened in some sort of naturalistic way. I've heard Christians argue against divine intervention in an event that is supernatural from top to bottom, and I don't understand that.
Ark full of animal shit? Poof, it's gone. Need to get penguins to swim to the Middle East and walk overland to the ark? Snap your fingers.
No disagreements here! Of course I see this paradigm espoused once every 10-20 times I see people insist that the observable evidence indicates a worldwide flood with all the animals on a boat in the past few thousand years.
I am sorry you have struggled. God’s gift of reason allows us to grapple but it isn’t intended to distress us - quite the opposite. Remember, the Bible nowhere states that it as a whole or any book within in it is intended as modern-style biological history. Hint: think about the concept days and of the sun - and of the two creation stories. The Catholic Church (how we have the Christian Bible), like Israel before Her, never “struggled” (in the sense I understand you to mean) with these kind of questions. As an objective historical matter, these “problems” appear only with the modern phenomena of protestantism and Americanism. Infallible Sacred Tradition and Magisterium allow Infallible Scripture to come alive as intended and you and I - while encouraged to grapple with Scripture - don’t need to seek for and fail to solve modernist dilemmas - it’s honestly very liberating. That the Holy Spirit inspired and canonized scripture through the Catholic Church is but one of the many ways in which Christ’s promise of Comforter for his Bride has proven true.
What did the animals eat afterwards? All plant life would be dead being under water for months. Water above highest mtn: Everest is 5 miles above sea level. Plants crushed by pressure, lack of light and suffocated. Huge extra mass of water throws earth out of orbit. How did animals get back to Australia? Micro ecosystems wiped out. Lack of genetic diversity afterwards. Where did water drain if whole earth flooded? etc. and absurdity...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/evidence-for-a-flood-102813115/
Thank you for sharing this, which supports the idea there was a flood in a part of the world, which at that point would have been big enough to go as far as a person could even fathom. But not a flood that literally covers every piece of land in the entire world.
I believe in the Local Flood Theory because the Hebrew grammar allows for it.
The phrase used for the flood covering all the earth is used in other parts of the Bible where it doesn't literally mean over the whole planet.
Gavin from truthunites.org explains it here
Citation: https://truthunites.org/2015/01/03/why-a-local-flood/
I also suggest watching
Noah's Flood: Global or Regional? by InspiringPhilosophy
Genesis 6-9 is loaded with phrases like “of all flesh,” “all flesh in which was the breath of life,” “all mankind,” “all life under heaven,” “everything on the earth,” “all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered,” “water prevailed above the mountains.” A plain reading of this tells of a worldwide flood. That’s a lot of language to reinterpret.
I believe there was a flood, but it wasn't world-wide, and I don't believe the story of Noah. I was always taught that everything before Abraham was allegory, because those stories were passed down by oral tradition until Abraham and other Hebrew priests and scholars started writing them down.
Many stories in the Bible are parables and allegories. Not everything in the Bible is meant to be taken literally.
No. There isn't evidence of a global flood. (There isn't even enough water on earth to do that.) 2 is not a minimum viable population for any animal. The only animals that could've been collected, due to the raw logistics, are local ones. There wouldn't have been enough space on the ship for minimum viable populations of more than a couple of large animals. Along with animal extinction, there would be near-total extinction of terrestrial plant life, and fungi after being submerged for 3 months.
It's unreasonable, given that evidence, to declare the flood, as written, to be an established fact.
It's entirely possible that it was an embellished local event. Or it could be repeating the "cleansing flood" motif that shows up in various times and places. The author may not have known when he wrote it down.
That doesn't have to prevent anyone from having faith.
How far can the English word "real" be abused into unrecognizability? Let's find out.
Yep lmao. How circumspectly can people say the word "no"
Obviously no, but the amount of christians that do is alarming.
the amount of stupid people (that believe the story is true) in this sub alone is already alarming.