Is belief in God or the Bible necessary to believe in a massive flood.

I do not know where you cant put this thread.First of all, this is not about proof for or against a flood.The question to answer is this one: Is belief in God or the Bible necessary to believe of a past recent massive flooding event ?What got me thinking is this: even if you do not believe in the innerancy of the Bible, you still have to consider that before it was a religious book, it was a historical manuscript, and that it talks about a major flooding-water event in the recent past. You also have to consider that other cultures around the world talk about a similar event, such as the gilgamesh epic (no matter which one came first).Now this is the thing. Is it possible to explore the idea of a major cataclysmic water event in the past regardless to the fact that the manuscripts have become a religious book ? Or does its implication with a religion somehow put this possibility off-limits ?This idea first came to me when reports started coming out a couple of years ago that such a major (almost planetwide) event may had happened on Mars. But it seems that this possibility is somehow unacceptable in the case of the earth. But if a major water cataclism could happen on Mars through naturalistic phenomenons, couldn't similar phenomenons have happened on earth and led to a similar result here ? And that the people of the time had interpreted it as a punishment from some sort of god and recorded it down as such, when in reality it had a naturalistic explanation ?Once again, I do not want piles of evidence for or against such an event, just discuss if you can believe in naturalism and still accept the idea of such an event as possible. It obviously doesn't have to be worldwide lol, since people could have exagerated such an event to the extent it was worldwide.(I want to specify that personnally, I believe that there was such an event in the past that do link all the different accounts of it in cultures around the world)Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

Thanks for all the replies everyoneIt took me a lot of time to write that OP, first because of language barrier, second because having it say the idea I wanted wasn't easy. I know theoretically science must not do this, but in practise it is an easy thing to do. I'm not really talking about a local flood, sorry if it looked that way in the OP. I'm referring more to massive one time event, such as an asteroid crashing down in the sea and making a shitload of water cover like all-middle east and half of africa. Or like a gigantic water reservoir below the surface just exploding through the crust somewhere and having water all over the place. (Yeah I know my examples are a bit BS lol, but you get the idea) You seem to know a bit more than me on that subject lol. But I always considered that Moses had written those books as historical. Reading through genesis you can even have the impression that he didn't just copy down oral traditions, but could actually have had even older manuscripts in his possession, which he would have copied and annoted. I didn't mean to present the OT as a single work, but since what we are talking refers almost solely on genesis and the other writings of Moses, than it is pretty much a single work.And didn't he also use the same verbs tenses in genesis than in other historical acounts in the OT ? (I don't know **** about verbe tenses in hebrew though lol) I'll look that up, but I think that at least from the semantic aspect of it, genesis was written as historical. Well from what I remember (that mars story is 2-3 years old, and so pretty far in my head) what they observed on mars to come to this conclusion is only landscapes and geomorphology not unlike the ones we see here on earth. Yeha well I was reluctant to write planet-wide lol, but I remember that this was the impression it gave me when I first read it. It is obviously not the case and just an impression, but the event(s) seem more impressive than any local flood we see here on earthhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-water-science-01k.htmlFor everyone that mentioned evidence for any such event here on earth, we will hopefully be discussing this throughout the summer.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Fix a quote box.

I agree with most of what you say. I believe that such a flood happened not with blind faith lol, but from evidence which as I've said will be discussed throughout the summer, so we wont discuss it here since it would be off-topic (i do night shifts on a campground this summer, so I got lots of time)I agree that cultural influence can be invoked for the ressemblances in the middle-eastern accounts. (who influenced who is another matter) I dont know about mongolians or australian aboriginal, but I do know about some even farther than that. The cherokee in the US have an account of a flood that is global, where there was a favored family for whom a Boat was provided by a Deity.I have a pretty funny anecdote about this. The Cree tribes here in Canada where I live also have a myth about a global flood. In their account, not only was a boat provided by a God, but they also brought the animals of the forest with them. Mooses, beavers, Deers, bears, all were on board the boat with the favored family to avoid the wrath of the gods.One of my parents friend went to university in Chicoutimi (where I live) and did a BAC in history. (I don't know how you call that in english, the step before a masters degree). In one of his classes, the teacher gave out that myth to the class. You'll figure that my parents' friend was very surprised to read it and discover that it was very ressembling to the biblical account of the flood (with the usual cultural differences, not the same god, not the same animals, not the same names o the people, etc.) He turned out to do a work on the correlation between that account and the biblical one, and although the teacher was furious when he presented it to the class, the people present were completly astonished with the ressemblance and he got excellent feedback from them.So I know first-hand that their are accounts of a flood with stricking similarities with the biblical one in cultures in which there is no way they could have been influenced by middle-eastern culture.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

But the teacher made it clear that this myth was in Cree culture before the arrival of missionaries. How can historians know that kind of information I don't know, I'm much more into science than history.It is still in their Oral tradition, and so even if missionaries had changed the translated versions, it would not have altered their oral tradition. (I don't know about the cherokee indians over in the US, but here they still live in small camps as their ancestors and still speak their original language), except they have guns and snowmobiles lol)(I researched that possibility you mentioned since it was brought up by one of my friends when I told the story. As far as I'm concerned, it is special pleading because their is absolutly no evidence pointing this could be the case ...)Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

Any link where I could see that article ?EDIT: The question I am asking myself right now is this one: how come there would have been such a major cultural influence on the tribes' respective flood myths-accounts (hawai, peru, fiji islands, aztecs, australia, papago, cherokee(US), Cree (Canada), etc.) but no influence on their respective myths of creation.In all regards, if the flood myth would have been changed by influence, so would their myth of the beginning of the world ...Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

I doubt my local french univeristy will have have that english article ... Also, dwise1, don't worry with the links I can read well in english.The Cree here are on high grounds, Quebec is on the Canadian Shield, which I believe is over 200fts of the sea level(BTW I added an edit to my previous message)

quote:

---

Well there aren't any writings of Moses, and you won't find anything resembling real history before Judges (and even that is more legend than history).

​

Verb tenses can't distinguish between history and myth or legend. Almost all myths and legends are about the supposed past, and are written in the past tense

---

Maybe in english they can't, but in hebrew you can distinguish poetry/figurative from historical accounts. Obviously verb tenses can't prove if this is really history or just a myth. But it can tell you if, for the author who wrote it down, it was meant to be history or myth. I had seen a research o nthis in the past, and the % of genesis being written as historical narrative was something like 99,947% (I'll try to find that)

quote:

---

You mean the landscapes and geomorphology is like that produced by a flood. That's why they say that a flood caused it. So all you have to do is find similar features formed in Earth's recent past, on the scale for however big a flood you want.

---

Seems to be produced by a flood, so much that they compare it to the grand canyon! ? (Mars – Facts and Information about the Planet Mars)I'll probably start a thread soon about landscapes on earth and their relevance to a flood, we will be able to discuss it there.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

quote:

---

Only because they are both big valleys. It's not as if there is any sort of detailed comparison between them

---

Yeah I know, it was more of a joke lol

quote:

---

*If* you are right about there being a clear distinction in the syntax - and if the author even made a clear distinction between the two

---

Hebrews use special grammatical forms for recording history. Genesis (even 1-11) has this same as Exodus, Joshua, Judges, etc. Which shows that the author who wrote it recorded it as history.Allegory or myth would not have been written in the same grammatical form as historical records.Its not just about the verb tenses. t involves pretty much every aspect of semantics

quote:

---

If that figure is correct it pretty much disproves the assertion that there is a clear distinction. Because Genesis is much more than 0.53% myth.

---

Maybe I misexpressed myself, but that % is not the % of historical text compared to figurative text. It is the % that the author would have written it down as if it was historical compared to thinking it was figurative.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

I'm done for the night, last comment and then to sleep. Isn't your reasoning a bit circular ?1. I know Genesis is a myth2. We can recognize hebrew historical/figurative texts by its grammar. This is shown to be true throughout the hebrew manuscripts3. Genesis is written with a historical grammar4. Thus this type of grammar can be used to write a figurative/mythological text, since I know genesis is a mythNotice that with this reasoning, Genesis becomes an exception opposed to the hebrew methodology. It also involves that since you know Genesis is a myth, than the author MUST have thought Genesis was a myth when he wrote it, but still used the historical grammar
.. compare to this line of reasoning:1. We can recognize hebrew historical/figurative texts by its grammar. This is shown to be true throughout the hebrew manuscripts2. Genesis is written with a historical grammar3. Thus, Genesis is viewed as a historical text by the authorSaying that it was viewed as history by the author doesn't make it more, or less, history. It simply means that he thought it was history when he wrote it. If 4000 years later we think that it was a myth, fair enough, but it doesn't affect what the original author thought of it. Its not really an assumption, it more of a result of seeing the clear grammatical pattern of historical recordsI don't even understand wy we are arguing on this, either way it doesn't affect anything in the debate.EDIT: Sorry if it was misleading, it was not my intention.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

This is not the point I am trying to make lol ... I'm not saying that it must be accepted as historical. I'm saying the author thought it was historical, it does not prevent anyone from interpreting it as mythical. Indeed it would be circular reasoning if I had said that the grammar was the only way to identify a text as historical (always according to the author). However, I said no such thing. Other hebrew texts have been identified independently to be historical. Good examples are 1-2-3 Mccabees, which reports the jewish rebellion against the greek empire. If I understand this correctly, you think he did not know what was a myth and what was history ? So he would have considered the egyptian myths he encountered as history also ? I would rather think that he would have identified egyptian myths as myths, and regarded his myths as historical(rightly or wrongly). Unless you believe that he would have lived with an extreme dichotomy in his head, thinking that all myths were history even though they are contradictoryThe other way I can understand your comment is that you're saying he didn't know it was a myth as we do now, and so he wrote it as real history. Which is what I've been saying all alongEdited by slevesque, : No reason given.

In any case, you may disagree, but I am not inventing this, as shown by this quote by Oxford Hebrew scholar James Barr: Barr, J., Letter to David C.C. Watson, 23 April 1984Note that Barr is not a creationist at all, he believes in evolution! Just like you, he does not believe in the historicity of Genesis, but he clearly understands what the author clearly intended to be understood.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

dwise1, I think Moses wrote genesis, but since I did not know if PaulK thought it was Moses, I prefered to simply refer to ''the author''.In any case, I don't even know why we are debating this. The very vast majority of hebrew scholars (to not say all of them) assert that Moses viewed genesis as real history, as the James Barr quote I put earlier says. Even Josephus viewed Genesis as history, since he put it in his book of antiquities of the Jews ... which is a history book. If it is fallacious, then you should be able to falsify it. You have to prove independantly that Moses viewed Genesis as myth, but still used the historical grammatical structure. If you don't have a counter example, you can say ''but you could be wrong!'' all you want, but it won't have much weight.

I'm getting the impression we're saying the same thing: they viewed their myth as history. You just say they didn't differentiate between myth and history, I just say they thought myth was history. Its the same thing lol.It never was about if it is a myth, or if it is history. It is about if they viewed it as such.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

How can you say ''that is wrong'' when I could quote myself at least four times saying exactly this in the discussion. You were arguing that I was saying we should view this as history because the author viewed it as history, I was arguing ONLY that the author viewed it as history but not that we should view it as history.In the OP, all I said was that if the author viewed it as history, then that it COULD be history. Not that it SHOULD ...Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

Hey, I think Moses was the author, that he did make a distinction between what he thought was myth and what he thought was history, and that was why he used the historical grammar to describe it.My position didn't changed, I just acknowledge that you can think otherwise because I don't have enough knowledge to prove that Moses did make the distinction between myth and history. I hate to do any sort of call to authority, but I think this because since I am no hebrew scholar, I can only trust the very vast majority scholars. Though there's no doubt in my mind that any reputated Hebrew scholar could prove this, since ultimately your argument feeds on my limited knowledge of the subject.Genesis was written as a record of the history of the jews since creation. Moses thought this was real history, and so has the Jewish people up to Josephus. His works are very reveiling on this. He did not write a ''myth's and legends of the Jews'' book, nor a review of ''Jewish religion''. He wrote a History book, his intention was to record the history of the jewish people, and surprisingly he included the creation, the flood, the exodus, etc. He did not make any distinction between this and the rest of their history such as the deportation to Babylon, or the Mccabee rebellion against the greeks. Did he mistake myth for history ? Maybe, but that doesn't hcange that his intentions was to write a history book.You correctly quoted me from the OP, I never wanted to argued if Moses mistook a mythical account for a historical account, which really, is besides the point. The point is that he thought it was history, and recorded it as history. His intention was it to be taken as historical and not mythical EVEN IF he had mistaken myth for history.