This is a point that came up in a discussion about taking the Bible literally, but it echos stuff I've seen in other threads from time to time, so I'm proposing a new thread all it's own.
There are many common elements in the mythologies of different cultures around the world. (ie Flood stories, dragons, man created from clay, etc.)
Many of the YEC have sited these as evidence that their theory is correct.
But aren't there other (better?) explainations for these stories. I'd like to suggest a few.
1) Common experience - (the is very close to the YEC argument) world wide changes in climate / world wide events will have similiar effects on the cultures of different people. For example: At the end of the Ice Age, the water levels would have risen re-flooding the vast shoreline tracts which had openned and become inhabited. Peoples all over the world would have experienced "a great flood", but not "The Great Flood".
2) Common reasoning - given similar discoveries, people from different cultures may draw similiar conclusions. For example: Megalodon (giant shark) teeth are fairly common fossils. There are a lot of them, they are generally well preserved. If someone with no frame of reference other than the natural world around them discovered one of these fist sized teeth, it's not hard to see how they would imagine it coming from a "dragon".
3) Common psychology - No matter what culture you come from, some things don't change. Children are born, people grow old and die, some people are mean, others are nice. Isn't it reasonable that facing similiar experiences, people would develop similiar coping mechanisms/rationalizations? For example: As babies are born with a flood of water from the womb, so too, couldn't the world have been born from a flood of water?
4) Common materials - The natural world offers up only so much for building materials. We've become very tricky at teasing out alloys and mixing up concrete, but clearly there was a time when people had only sticks, stones and clay. Given this limited exposure to materials isn't it reasonable that many different cultures have myths of man's creation being from clay. After all, clay is much more like flesh than sticks or stones.
To my mind, these explain many of the points raised about the common myths. They do so within the framework of the evidence at hand and don't rely on "magic".
Anyone have other examples? Questions? Disagreements?
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