Super Evolution and the Flood

Good point. Assuming that the person who first put this story on paper was, in some sense, taking dictation from God, and all these details were left out, they must therefore be completely irrelevant to the account -- at least, in God's estimation. OTOH, we might speculate whether the original writer was exercising some independent judgment on how to express the account, and decided on his own whether certain details were relevant, based on his assessment of who the readers would be. Either way, the time and resources required for writing things down were presumably quite significant at the time, so there would have been some motivation to skip unnecessary details.That same propensity to skip over details is also a characteristic of fables and parables, and the question becomes: what is it, exactly, that makes it necessary for the story of Noah to be taken as a factual, historical account, rather than a parable or fable?The reason seems to be that you need to have a God who can willfully (and seemingly on a whim) do things that violate the natural laws that He Himself has presumably created. He does this, apparently, because of the personal relationship that exists between Him and the humans He created (or because of the relationship that doesn't exist, because these silly humans are so obtuse). Why you need this, I can't fathom.But okay, fine. Anything is possible, given that it hasn't been explicitly and literally set down in the account as part of the "official record" of events. Any attempt to consider the physical ramifications of the details that are provided is misguided and pointless, because such an attempt would normally try to apply the physical laws that we have observed to operate consistently for as long as we have been paying attention to physical laws. Even though this consistency applies equally in all cultures, not just the Judeo-Christian community, God can circumvent these laws as he pleases, so we simply have to conclude that our natural history is a patchwork quilt of events consistent with physical laws as we know them, and events that violate those laws because of God's whim.The funny thing, though, is that the latter type of events is quite limited -- it consists only of this particular set of accounts found in the Bible -- whereas the former type of events (those that obey physical laws) continue to accumulate day after day, We are even able, through careful experimentation and study involving things like core samples from polar ice caps, ocean floors and geological formations, to build up an increasingly clear, detailed and cross-correlated picture of events that occurred long before our own lifetimes, and these are also all consistent with physical laws as we know them.Until we start observing more cases of miraculous intervention by God, clearly demonstrating His willingness and ability to violate physical laws, the events of this type that are conveyed with such meager detail in the Bible will continue to dwindle to a smaller and smaller minority.Actually, of course, as so many people in this forum have expressed repeatedly, our "law-abiding" observations have already reached the point where they impose a heavier and more complicated burden on any notion of God's "law-breaking" behavior: e.g. in order for the story of the flood to be "true" in any literal sense, we must either expect to see a clear record of it in ice-cap core samples and continental sedimentations, or else we must conclude that these details, so obviously extraneous to the story, were all manipulated by God to conceal any positive evidence that the event ever happened.I suppose there is another alternative: the story of the flood could reflect a sort of group hallucination, affecting a whole population whose descendants included the people who wrote down the OT books. In this case, all God needed to do was to implant this shared vision in all their brains. Not only is this much simpler in physical terms, but it is also "well attested" -- it's the sort of thing He does all the time anyway, and is presumably still doing. People call it "revelation", though in the case of making the flood story "real", the process would have presumably been more subtle, because people would have had to accept it as personal tactile experience, rather than as a direct input from God. But what the heck -- anything is possible, given that the details have not been provided in the "official record."I guess that might also explain why so many groups elsewhere in the world do not share a belief in that particular series of events...

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.