Category Archives: Genesis & Flood

03/15/22

Trends in Substance Use and Abuse

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The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) provides information on tobacco, alcohol, and drug use, mental health and other health-related concerns in the US. NSDUH began in 1971 and is conducted yearly in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) for 2020, published in October of 2021, interviewed almost 70,000 people. It is directed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), an agency in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NSDUH has been conducted by RTI International, a nonprofit research organization in North Carolina.

Criteria from the DSM-5 were used in order to categorize the substance use disorders (SUD) of the respondents. SUDs are classified by impairment caused by the recurrent use of alcohol or other drugs, including health problems, disability, and the failure to meet major responsibilities at work, school, or home. Respondents were said to have an SUD if they had two or more of the eleven criteria noted on page 27 of the 2020 NSDUH survey. The following figure provided an overview of the number of people aged 12 and older who initially used the noted substances in the past 12 months.

A surprising finding was that there are more people trying hallucinogens for the first time in the past year than cigarettes. This is likely a result of popular and research interest into using hallucinogens such as ketamine and MDMA, to treat mental health issues. See “Psychedelics Are Not a Magic Bullet”, “Give MDMA a Chance?”, “In Search of a Disorder for Ketamine” and other articles on this website.

But it should come as no surprise that the top two substances used for the first time in the past year were alcohol and marijuana. Alcohol is legal in all states and although marijuana is illegal under federal law, recreational marijuana is legal in 18 states and 37 states have legalized medical marijuana. Only in four states, South Carolina, Kansas, Idaho and Wyoming is marijuana still fully illegal. See “Map of Marijuana Legality by State.”

The above figure shows that in the past 12 months, 4.1 million people began using alcohol and 1.3 million people tried a cigarette for the first time. There also were 2.8 million new marijuana users, 1.4 million new hallucinogen users, 1.2 million people who first misused prescription pain relievers, 950,000 new misusers of prescription tranquilizers, and 734,000 new misusers of prescription stimulants. There were also 489,000 new cocaine users and 153,000 new methamphetamine users.

Despite the opioid epidemic, estimates of initial heroin use in the past year were the lowest category of new users at 103,000. Nearly 90 percent of individuals using heroin for the first time did so after the age of 25. Among adults aged 26 or older, 91,000 people initiated heroin use in 2020.

Substance use disorders are with alcohol or drugs; or a mixture of both. There were 40.3 million people 12 or older estimated as meeting the criteria for a SUD in the past year. This included 28.3 million who had an alcohol use disorder (AUD) and 18.4 million who had an illicit drug use disorder (IDUD). Among those individuals with an AUD, 21.9 million had AUD but not an illicit drug use disorder. Among the 18.4 million people with a past year IDUD, 11.9 million has an IDUD but not AUD. This meant there were 6.5 million who met the criteria for both AUD and IDUD. See the figure below.

Age is again seen as a factor with the presence of SUDs in the past year. When the figures for substance use disorder were looked at by age, the percentage of people with a past year SUD was highest among young adults aged 18 to 25 (24.4% or 8.2 million people). This was followed by adults 26 or older (14.0% or 30.5 million people).

Among people aged 12 or older, 10.2% (28.3 million people) has a past year AUD. The percentage of people who had past year AUD was highest among young adults aged 18 to 25 (15.6% or 5.2 million people). Again, this was followed by adults 26 or older (10.3% or 22.4 million people).

Among people aged 12 or older, 6.6% (18.4 million people) had an IDUD in the past year. The percentage of young adults aged 18 to 25 (14.6% or 4.9 million people) was higher than the percentages of adults aged 26 or older (5.6% or 12.3 million people) and adolescents aged 12 to 17 (4.9% or 1.2 million people). See the following figure.

However, the vast majority of the population did not have a SUD of any kind in the past year. The 40.3 million people with a past year SUD represent 14.5% of the population aged 12 or older. The remaining 236.6 million people, 85.5% of the population aged 12 or older, had no past year SUD. But when substances are distinguished as marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine, stimulants, pain relievers and heroin, the number of people with the respective substance use disorder was as follows. Notice that a significant majority of people with an illicit drug use disorder had a marijuana use disorder.

Among people aged 12 or older, 5.1% (or 14.2 million people) has a marijuana use disorder in the past year. With people aged 12 or older, .8% (or 2.3 million people) had a prescription pain reliever use disorder; and 6% (or 1.5 million people) had a methamphetamine use disorder. Among people aged 12 or older .5% (or 1.3 million people) had a cocaine use disorder; .6% (or 1.5 million people) had a methamphetamine use disorder; .3% (or 758,000 people) had a prescription stimulant use disorder; and .2% (or 691,000 people) had a heroin use disorder.

When the use of marijuana, pain relievers and methamphetamines were looked at by age, the percentage of young adults aged 18 to 25 with marijuana use disorder (13.5% or 4.5 million people) was significantly higher than the percentages for adolescents aged 12 to 17 (4.1% or 1.0 million people) or adults 26 or older (4.0% or 8.7 million people). Prescription pain reliever use disorder and methamphetamine use disorder for all three age groups were only nominally different from each other. See the following figure.

There seems to be a clear pattern, particularly among young adults, that beginning marijuana use leads to an increased chance of developing a marijuana use disorder. Data on the perceived risk of harm with the above substances may be one factor explaining where this trend may be headed. Respondents of the 2020 NSDUH survey were asked how much they thought people risk harming themselves physically and in other ways when they used various substances in certain amounts or frequencies.

Among people 12 and older, 70.7% of people thought there was a great risk of harm from smoking one or more packs of cigarettes daily, and 68.7% saw great risk from having four or five alcoholic drinks nearly every day. The percentages of people who thought there was a great risk from cocaine or heroin use once or twice a week were 84.7% and 93.2%, respectively. “In contrast, about one fourth of people (27.4%) perceived great risk from smoking marijuana once or twice a week.” See the following figure.

Young adults aged 18 to 25 in 2020 were less likely than adolescents aged 12 to 17 or adults aged 26 or older to perceive great risk of harm from smoking marijuana weekly. Research has identified associations among adults between decreases in perceptions of great risk of harm from smoking marijuana weekly and increases in marijuana use. Nevertheless, people can experience adverse effects from marijuana use, such as marijuana use disorder or injury resulting from operating a motor vehicle while impaired by marijuana. Therefore, it is necessary to educate young adults about adverse effects of marijuana use.

The growth of the marijuana legalization movement will likely lead to increased marijuana use and disorder over all age groups. The 2.8 million first time users of marijuana in 2020, along with the 14.2 million marijuana users who meet the criteria for marijuana use disorder, and the significantly lower perception of there being a risk of harm from smoking marijuana once or twice a week suggest as much. But that isn’t the only concern the NSDUH 2020 hints at. In the near future, I’ll look at other issues present in the data, so return and search for “NSDUH 2020.”

The NSDUH provides information that can be used to support prevention and treatment programs, monitor substance use trends, estimate the need for treatment and inform public health policy. Let’s hope its information on marijuana and other substances is helping to inform public health policy and is used to develop future prevention and treatment programs.

10/9/18

The Not-So Global Flood Part 2

credit: Douglas Simmonds/British Museum; Cuneiform tablet containing an ark story

There are flood stories in addition to that found in the Bible from Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) cultures such as Babylon, Sumer, and Assyria. The Sumerian account is in a text known as the “Eridu Genesis,” which combines a creation story and a flood account. The Babylonian account, known as the Epic of Atrahasis, also combines a creation story and a flood account. A better-known Babylonian version of the flood in the Gilgamesh Epic casts Gilgamesh, a mid-third millennium BC king, as the flood hero. The storyline in all three tells a similar tale.

The above description, and much of what follows, was taken from The Lost World of the Genesis Flood by Tremper Longman and John Walton. In Part 1 of this article we looked at how Longman and Walton suggested the literary use of hyperbole in the Genesis flood account helps suggest why geological science does not support the biblical story of a global flood. Here we look at the similarities and differences of Biblical and ANE flood stories, as well as scientific evidence of a flood that possibly spawned them.

Because of their displeasure with humanity, the gods (at least some of the gods) decide to bring a flood to destroy them. In each case, an individual was saved from the impending destruction through a warning and given instructions to build an ark. The ark’s shape differs in each account. There is a round one in the Epic of Atrahasis (more on this later), a cubical ark in the Gilgamesh Epic, and the oblong ark of Noah. “While the shape of the arks in the various stories differs, remarkably the floor space of the arks is nearly identical.” Ken Ham seems to have taken some creative license by building his Ark Encounter to a slightly larger scale and with more modern looking contours than described here.

After building the ark, the flood hero and others (family and in some cases even more people) as well as animals enter the ark. The flood waters rise and finally ebb to the point that the ark comes to rest. The Gilgamesh Epic and the biblical account note the ark settles on a mountain (Nimush [Nisir] and Ararat, respectively). In these two versions we also hear that Uta-napishti and Noah let out three birds to determine whether the waters had receded to the point that they could disembark. After stepping off the ark, the flood heroes offer a sacrifice to (the) god(s). . . .The flood is understood across all accounts to be motivated by encroaching disorder, and sending the flood represents a strategy to restore order. Though all descriptions are general, each literary reflection provides its own perspective on what constituted the disorder. . . .While the similarities are striking, so are the differences. Indeed, there are so many differences in detail that we won’t mention them all, but they include things like the length and duration of the flood, the size and shape of the ark, the number and identity of people that go on the ark, the name of the flood heroes, and the order of the birds sent out to determine whether the waters of the flood had yet receded.

There has been an interesting and recent discovery with regard to the Babylonian flood account. A cuneiform tablet about the size of a cell phone was brought to the attention of Dr. Irving Finkel, Deputy Keeper of Middle East at the British Museum. He is one a handful of experts capable of sight-reading cuneiform. As soon as he saw the tablet he knew it was an account of the Babylonian flood. The front side of the tablet contains a detailed description of the construction of the Babylonian ark, which was a round vessel with a diameter of about 230 feet and 20-foot-high walls. An intriguing detail provided on this tablet was that “the animals enter two-by-two.” Given the detailed description on how Atrahasis was to construct his ark, Finkel resolved to see if he could replicate the process. You can read about his discovery and then watch a forty minute video, “The Real Noah’s Ark,” of his quest on The History Blog: “Noah’s round ark takes to the water.”

The assumptions by Finkel in the video about the biblical text and their dates won’t fit with conservative Christian scholarship. He believed the Epic of Atrahasis was based on an actual flood and that the biblical flood narrative was added to Scripture after the Jews returned from Babylonian captivity in 537 BC. However, The Lost World of the Flood noted excavations at Megiddo unearthed a fragment of the Gilgamesh Epic dating from the time of the Judges (1400 BC to 1050 BC) at the end of the second millennium.

Finkel disregarded the possibility the cuneiform tablet used hyperbole to describe the dimensions of the ark in his attempt to “prove” it could have been seaworthy. His single-mindedness reminded me of Ken Ham wanting to “prove” the truth of the biblical dimensions of Noah’s ark by building the Ark Encounter. Longman and Walton commented that like the biblical ark and the other Mesopotamian arks “this vessel [the round ark of Atrahasis] is inherently not seaworthy.” If you watch the video notice how you can see the bilge pump working to keep the leaking ark afloat at the end of the documentary.

Longman and Walton had a discussion of the difficulty for moderns to understand what an ancient communicator meant because we do not think the same way the communicator did and because elements referred to in the text or story may be foreign to us. Although they were discussing the ancient human communicators of Scripture, what they said has relevance for what seems to have been Finkel’s error with the cuneiform tablet. They said: “A prophet and his audience share a history, a culture, a language, and the experiences of their contemporaneous lives.” If we are to understand Scripture (or any ancient document) rightly, we have to start by putting aside our own cognitive environment or cultural river, “with all our modern issues and perspectives, to understand the cultural river of the ancient intermediaries.”

We can begin to understand the claims of the text as an ancient document by first paying close attention to what the text says and doesn’t say. It is too easy to make intrusive assumptions based on our own culture, cognitive environment, traditions or questions (i.e., our cultural river). It takes a degree of discipline as readers who are outsiders not to assume our modern perspectives and impose them on the text, but often we do not know we are doing it because our own context is so intrinsic to our thinking and the ancient world is an unknown.

In their attempts to replicate the arks described in their respective texts, both Ken Ham and Irving Finkel failed to recognize the use of hyperbole by the ancient authors in their description of their “arks” and the circumstances of the flood. Yet the parallels between ANE flood stories and Genesis 6-8 suggest a common previous event. Could there have been a devastating flood where many people died that generated both the biblical and the ANE flood stories?

Longman and Walton believe there was a real event behind the flood story just as there was an actual conquest behind the report of Joshua’s campaigns in Joshua 1-12. “We cannot be sure, but we have evidence of more than one flood that would be potential candidates for the inspiration of the story.” They identified one possibility described by William Ryan and Walter Pitman in Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event that Changed History. Ryan and Pitman believe that around 5600 BC a flood from the Mediterranean burst through the Bosporus, pouring saltwater into what had been a freshwater lake four hundred feet below the breached dam in the Bosporus Strait. The modern Black Sea was the result.

Ryan and Pitman suggest that those who survived this flood remembered it as they immigrated to new locations, thus inspiring flood stories that we are aware of among later cultures, including the Babylonian and biblical accounts. We add that each would have taken specific shape according to the cultural and particularly religious beliefs that they had.Ryan and Pitman’s thesis is intriguing. Before they encountered this evidence, they doubted that the biblical flood had any reference to a real historical event. Rather, it was pure myth. Now they believe a real event stands behind the flood story.

The above graphic, found in Noah’s Flood, captures the thesis of Ryan and Pitman. The rising floodwaters flowing through the Bosporus Strait from the Mediterranean Sea (seen at the southwestern corner of the Black Sea) forced the diverse people groups settled around the original fresh water lake to migrate to safer areas. The people groups to the south embedded their experience into the flood stories of the ANE cultures that arose from them.  Longman and Walton said: “the literary-theological interpretation of the event is inspired, not the event itself.”

Still, Longman and Walton hesitate to say this particular flood generated the biblical flood story. “We do not believe we can reconstruct the historical event from the biblical account.” Whatever the precise historical event, the story was told from generation to generation and eventually included in the Pentateuch as the story of Noah and the flood.

We don’t think it’s possible to date the event, locate the event, or reconstruct the event in our own terms. That is not a problem because the event itself, with which everyone in the Near East is familiar, is not what is inspired. What is inspired and thus the vehicle of God’s revelation is the literary-theological explanation that is given by the biblical author. . . .The similarities in the telling of the flood story between the Eridu Genesis, Atrahasis, Gilgamesh tablet 11, and the biblical account may be explained not necessarily by literary borrowing but by the fact that this story has been passed down from generation to generation by those who float in the same cultural river.

10/2/18

The Not-So Global Flood, Part 1

Noah’s Ark by Simon de Myle (1570); in the public domain from Wikimedia Commons

Even a casual reader of the Biblical account of the Flood in Genesis 6-8 will see the text describes a worldwide, not a local flood. The problem is there is no scientific evidence to support a worldwide flood. Some people believe this means the science must be wrong if the Bible says there was a worldwide flood. Young earth creationists point to the so-called scientific evidence of flood geology for a global flood, but it just doesn’t “hold water.” So do you have to choose between the Bible and science with regard to the Flood?

In their book, The Lost World of the Flood, Tremper Longman and John Walton noted how some scholars, feeling the persuasive power of the lack of any geological evidence for a worldwide flood, want to argue the biblical text describes a local flood. They said the local flood interpretation was “a noble attempt” to make sense of the lack of scientific evidence for a global flood while it held fast to the Bible. “In spite of its good intentions and proper motivations, the attempt to interpret the biblical text as knowingly describing a local flood remains unconvincing.”  Longman and Walton believe while the rhetoric of the flood narrative is intentionally universal, “it is actually the impact and significance that is universal rather than the range and scope” of the flood itself. In other words, “Genesis 6-9 pertains to a local flood described rhetorically as a worldwide flood to make a theological point.”

The rhetorical device used in the Flood narrative is hyperbole, conscious exaggeration for the sake of effect. In How to Read the Bible as Literature, Leland Ryken said hyperbole does not intend to be factual. It actually suggests a lack of literal truth in what it says. For example, Genesis 41:57 says that “all the earth” came to Egypt to buy grain from Joseph because the famine was so great. Deuteronomy 10:22 said while only seventy Israelites went down to Egypt, “the Lord your God has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

Ryken added that hyperbole expresses emotional truth. “Hyperbole is the voice of conviction.” People use hyperbole in everyday discourse when they feel strongly about something—“No one believes that!” In the Gospel of Matthew after finishing with the rich young man, Jesus said the rich only enter the kingdom of heaven with great difficulty. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

Longman and Walton noted how the Bible also describes historical events besides the Flood narrative hyperbolically to make a theological point. They pointed to the conquest of the Promised Land in Joshua 1-12. “If we read Joshua 1-12 as a straightforward, dispassionate report of the wars in Joshua, we would have to conclude that all of Canaan was taken by the Israelites and not a single Canaanite survived.” Yet Joshua 13:1-6 is a description of all the lands that remained to be conquered when he was “old and advanced in years.” A rough estimate would place at most only fifty percent of Canaan in Israelite hands at that time. Judges 1 confirms the Israelites still had more of Canaan to conquer, as the Israelites “did not drive them out completely.”

We believe that rather than trying to woodenly harmonize the two accounts, we should recognize that the author of Joshua emphasized accounts of victories and omitted setbacks and defeats in order to celebrate the beginning of the Abrahamic promise of land. . . . The conquest narratives, thus, are interested in the success of the conquest since they showed God was fulfilling his promise made in Genesis 12:1-3.

Beginning with Genesis 6:5-8, the account of the flood uses hyperbole to describe the pervasive chaos and wickedness of humanity—every intention of the thoughts of the human heart was only continual evil. The Lord was sorry he made humans and intended to return all of creation to chaos or non-order by blotting out humanity and all other creatures, “for I am sorry that I have made them.” Yet Noah found favor in his sight.

Only the most literally minded would take this language to mean that everyone on earth had only evil motives for every act. However, the hyperbole certainly expresses well the fact that evil had reached an unprecedented level and that God was going to act to restore order.

Even the ark’s dimensions are hyperbolic. Genesis 6:15 described the ark as about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. Ancient ships that could navigate in the Mediterranean depicted in ancient Egyptian art from around 2500 BC were no longer than 180 feet in length. “It is hard to imagine ancient readers taking this description as if it referred to an actual boat. There would have been nothing like it or even close in the ancient world.”

Indeed, it is probably easier for a modern audience to misunderstand the text and take it as if it is describing an actual boat. Certainly that is the case with Ken Ham, a leading young-earth creationist. In July of 2016 Ken Ham opened the Ark Encounter, a “life-sized” replica of the ark that people can go on. Ham’s stated purpose is to show that a literal ark of these dimensions can be built and can house all the animals necessary to survive the flood.

Mid-eighteenth century wooden boats reached lengths of 327 to 329 feet. But they were “built with iron bolts and steel supports” which were not available to Noah. And they were notoriously unstable in the water. “Let’s remember that the ark as described in the Bible, if taken as precise measurements of an actual boat, is larger than any wooden boat built not just in antiquity but at any time, including today.”

An ancient reader would have recognized the description of the flood itself as hyperbolic language. The fountains of the great deep burst; and the windows of the heavens were opened (Genesis 7:11). This reflects an ancient cosmology of a flat earth with subterranean waters (the fountains of the great deep) and more waters above the firmament released by opening the windows of heaven. See “Why Is The Sky Blue?” for more on this cosmology and its presence in the Babylonian creation myth.

As the waters flowed from deep within the earth and from the sky, “they lifted the ark high above the earth” (Gen 7:17). Even the “high mountains” were covered (Gen 7:19), and not just covered but with water rising to more than fifteen cubits (twenty-three feet) above the mountains. The description truly is that of a worldwide flood, not a local flood. Though modern readers don’t see it, the original audience would have understood that such a description is hyperbole.

Longman and Walton believe the biblical authors sometimes used hyperbole to make important theological points. And they used it in a way they expected their readers to recognize, not only with the Genesis flood narrative. Recall the last verse of the Gospel of John, once again clearly using hyperbole: “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

The presence of hyperbole in Scripture is also not contradictory to a belief in the evangelical doctrine of inerrancy. They pointed out where this is substantiated in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, Article 13:

WE AFFIRM the propriety of using inerrancy as a theological term with reference to the complete truthfulness of Scripture.WE DENY that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations.

Seeing hyperbole in Genesis 6-8 does not take us back to the forced choice referred to in the opening paragraph, with hyperbole neutralizing the Biblical text in order to have it agree with science. Describing a real event in hyperbolic language doesn’t make it a myth. As Longman and Walton said: “There is a real event behind the story just as there was an actual conquest behind the hyperbolic presentation of Joshua’s conquest.” The parallels between Ancient Near East flood stories and Genesis 6-8 suggest a common previous event—a devastating flood that killed many people. “Stories about the flood were passed down orally for generations from those who descended from the time the flood actually occurred.” The similarities and differences between the Biblical and ANE flood stories, as well as tantalizing scientific evidence of a possible flood that spawned them will be discussed in Part 2.

07/27/18

All About the Flood

Creative Commons license (CC by SA 3.0) for Noah’s Ark: The Flood begins by Phillip Medhurst

In July of 2016, Answers in Genesis opened the Ark Encounter in northern Kentucky. Ted Davis noted in his article, “Flooding the World with Creationism,” how a so-called “literal” interpretation of the Biblical Flood story was crucial for the view of Scripture held by Answers in Genesis and other young-earth creationists. Woven into their position is the idea of flood geology, namely that fossils are relics of the biblical Flood. This idea was first named and popularized by George McCready Price, a self-taught geologist and author, who claimed that the fossil-bearing rocks seen in the various geologic layers had been produced all at once in a single worldwide flood. But what if flood geology is wrong and there is a more “literal” way to read the Genesis account of the Flood?

Flood geology is one of the foundational beliefs of young earth creationism. Ted Davis noted that “commitment to the YEC duo of a young earth and flood geology remained on the far periphery of conservative Protestantism from the Civil War down to 1961.” In that year Henry Morris and John Whitcomb published The Genesis Flood, which supported Price’s flood geology and eventually birthed the modern young earth creationist (YEC) movement. “Ultimately, then, young-earth creationism is all about the Flood. That’s why AiG built the Ark Encounter.”

The significance of flood geology for young-earth creationism must not be missed: if most fossils were formed in the Flood, then they were not formed through eons of earth history and we cannot draw evolutionary inferences from the fossil record. Thus, the Ark Encounter represents two mightily important things in the minds of creationists. First, the biblical story is literally true—a man named Noah actually constructed a huge wooden boat to save all animal “kinds” from dying in a worldwide flood. Second, the Flood produced the fossils, so we have no scientific evidence that evolution actually happened.

Davis pointed to three threads woven into the YEC understanding of the Genesis Flood story. The first is the biblical understanding of the text. Did a man named Noah actually construct a huge wooden boat in order to save all animal “kinds” from the judgment of a catastrophic worldwide flood? The second thread is scientific. Is there credible scientific evidence to support the claims of flood geology? Are fossils and the geological record explained by a worldwide, catastrophic flood? The third thread pulls at the origins of flood geology and its relationship to a belief in a young earth. Where did they come from and are they peripheral or fundamental to Christian belief and the gospel?

An accumulation of scientific and historical evidence questions whether the biblical Flood account can be taken at face value. Genesis 6-9 clearly describes a global flood that destroyed all humans and land animals except those who were protected in a huge wooden boat built by a man named Noah. However, as BioLogos noted in “How should we interpret the Genesis flood account?” the scientific and historic evidence concludes “there has never been a global flood that covered the entire earth, nor do all modern animals and humans descend from the passengers of a single vessel.” When early geologists (many of whom were Christians) questioned whether the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago, flood geology claimed the earth’s complex geologic record was the result of a violent, global Flood.

So belief in a young earth and flood geology are joined together in the so-called “plain reading of Scripture” promoted by AiG and other young earth creationists. “All other approaches are claimed to require hermeneutical manipulations that ultimately undermine the simple and clear message of the Bible.” Gregg Davidson and Ken Wolgemuth, who are Christian geologists, said the following in “Christian Geologists on Noah’s Flood”:

Flood Geology proponents would have us believe that there is extensive evidence for a violent, earth-wide flood that is apparent if one is willing to consider the possibility. As Christian geologists, we have no philosophical objection to a cataclysmic event of divine origin, and have long been willing to consider evidence of such an event. What we have observed, however, is that evidence for Flood Geology is largely, if not entirely, non-existent. Given the placement and character of sedimentary deposits currently on earth, deposition by a single flood is not only implausible, but utterly impossible unless God temporarily suspended His natural laws in order to establish layers and fossil beds that would subsequently communicate a story vastly different than what actually happened.

Davidson and Wolgemuth presented evidence from salt deposits, tree rings, the fossil record and the sequence of layers in the Grand Canyon that challenges flood geology. YEC counters that these conclusions are the result of human miscalculation and error. Since science is a human endeavor, it is subject to all the errors of humanity, while the Bible is God’s Word. Yet as Longman and Walton commented: “To pit the Bible against science in this fashion is problematic.” They agree with BioLogos: “Because we take God to be the author of the “book of nature” as well as the divine inspirer of the book of Scripture, we believe the proper interpretation of the Flood story will not be in conflict with what we have discovered in the natural world.”

Orthodox Christianity has traditionally affirmed a “two book” view of God’s truth, believing “God reveals himself in both the Bible and in nature.” The study of nature through scientific means it “will never contradict the Bible when both are rightly understood.” While the Bible is true in all it intends to teach us, our interpretations of what it teaches may not be correct. “We need to be open to the possibility that we have wrongly understood a particular passage.” With regard to the Genesis Flood account, is there an interpretative method that does not present us with a forced choice between what the text says and what science tells us?

In their book, The Lost World of the Flood, Tremper Longman and John Walton commented how discussions of the early chapters of Genesis often center on whether the accounts in chapters one through eleven are mythology or history. Framing the question in this way as a dichotomous choice between what is real (history) and what is not real (mythology) not only fails to do justice to the biblical text, it imposes a modern understanding of both mythology and history upon the text.

Today, we often consider the label mythology to imply that what is reported is “not real.” But in the ancient world, they did not consider what we call their mythology to be not real. To the contrary, they believed their mythology to represent the most important reality—deep reality, which transcends what could be reported in terms of events that have transpired in the strictly human realm. Indeed, they further considered that even the events in the human realm, which we might label history, found their greatest significance in aspects of the event that human eyewitnesses could not see—the involvement of the divine hand.

So we should be hesitant to think in such dichotomous terms as history and mythology when reading and interpreting ancient texts. The deepest reality should not be constrained by the limits of human observations of what “actually happened.” The significance of events in Genesis 1-11 is not found in their historicity but in their theology; “not in what happened … but in why it happened.” Israelites in the ancient world did not think about events in the same way we do today. “In the ancient world they viewed reality with an eye to the metaphysical (spiritual) world, and not just through the lens of empiricism.”

The accounts in Genesis 1-11 can be affirmed as having real events as their referents, but the events (yes, they happened) find their significance in the interpretation that they are given in the biblical text. That significance is not found in their historicity but in their theology; not in what happened (or even that something did happen) but in why it happened. What was God doing? That is where the significance is to be found. Our defenses of historicity can become reductionistic if we become too focused on proving the reality of events rather than on embracing the interpretation of the theological significance being traced by the author. The text has no interest in trying to prove the events took place. They assume they did, as do we. Instead they are offering an interpretation that constitutes the divine-human message that carries the authority of the text. Events are not authoritative; the interpretation of the narrator is.

Events, in other words, were more than just history. Seeing events in this way, through a lens that included both the spiritual and the human world, means that categories we moderns might label as mythical overlapped with what we would call the real world. Ancient peoples had a different way of knowing than we moderns do. However, this does not mean their view of events was any less real. In order to understand the Genesis Flood account, we need to understand what it meant to the original audience.

To the extent that the Israelites thought in similar ways, they would not distinguish between these ways of knowing. If such is the case, stating that they consider the flood to be a real event is not as clarifying as we might hope. We cannot draw distinctions about narratives that we are interested in if they do not draw their lines in the same places we do.

We should not impose an interpretation upon the Genesis narrative of the Flood that disregards how the ancient Israelites understood what was being said. The YEC emphasis on the historicity of a global flood fails to recognize that Genesis 1-11 was not written with our scientific world in mind. Its significance lies not in what happened, but why it happened. Longman and Walton put it this way:

Even though the Bible is written for us, it is not written to us. The revelation it provides can equip us to know God, his plan, and his purposes, and therefore to participate with him in the world we face today. But it was not written with our world in mind. In its context, it is not communicated in our language; it is not addressed to our culture; it does not anticipate the questions about the world and its operations that stem from our modern situations and issues.