Episode Details

Trying to find a silver lining in a very dark cloud: does it take an esoteric literary tool to redeem this classic Sunday School story?

Remember the story of Noah’s Flood from when you were a kid in Sunday School? The pictures of a smiling Noah stepping off a cute little ark with happy animals, and a happy sun beside a bright rainbow in the clear blue sky? At the time, did you notice all the dead bodies buried in the mud under the ark?

Yeah, my teacher avoided that part too.

This story of Noah’s Flood is a Trojan Horse for many people. The parts of it that are in plain sight are perfectly fine. A sight to behold. Beautiful even. And so you let your guard down and embrace it. But it’s what’s hidden inside that can eventually destroy one’s faith. It certainly did destroy mine.

For many who grapple closely with this story, it’s the incongruity between the details of this ancient Semitic story and our modern understanding of science which erodes faith. There’s just so much evidence against the story. Not just pieces of evidence, but so many different kinds of evidence. From geology … archaeology … genetics … ecology … hydrology … cosmology … engineering (of the Ark) … history (evidence for civilizations before and after the Fundamentalist dating of the event which show no evidence of a global flood). Even evidence from the Bible itself: the “Nephilim” which haunted the Semites even after the Flood!? And so one often feels forced to either choose science or the Bible, because it seems you can’t have both. [Although appearances can be deceiving.]

But another toxic ingredient in this story is the basic morality which you have to accept. That an all-loving and all-powerful God finds humans to be so evil that he has to wipe them out. And to do so by drowning them, rather than a painless and immediate annihilating snap-of-the-fingers . Ironically, the text says it’s their violence that he finds so