The distribution of Flood stories around the world has been long known. One possible explanation for such stories, of course, is that there was in fact a worldwide flood. However, we know from comparative religion and comparative mythology that many stories, not just flood stories, have parallels in widely dispersed cultures, in some cases cultures on the other side of oceans. Such parallels often seem to be unconnected with any universal historical event, and have often been explained in sociological and psychological ways, and in terms of what is called “phenomenology of religion” – as in the works of Mircea Eliade, the great Chicago scholar of comparative religion.
And when you think about it, a great flood, destruction by water, is a natural religious image, as is a great fire (often the world is conceived of as destined to end in a great fire, in various traditions). And of course, no one claims that there must have been a universal “great fire” in the past that got people thinking in those terms; fire is a natural symbol for mass destruction of life – as is flood.
Since substantial evidence for a worldwide flood at any period is virtually absent, and for one about the time of Noah (ca. 3100 BC or so) is pretty near nil, most geologists, archaeologists and historians, of any religious stripe, do not find the “it really happened” explanation convincing as an explanation of the global distribution of flood stories, and the psychology/phenomenology explanation is the predominant one among religion scholars.
PD Price will doubtless be able to name a hundred fundamentalist scholars who are convinced of a global flood about 3000 BC, but overwhelmingly such scholars are found within Protestant fundamentalist denominations, not even in all Protestant evangelical groups, and certain not in mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or Judaism (outside of a very tiny group of literalist Jews), or the Asian religious traditions.
Of course, that doesn’t prove the fundamentalists wrong, but it is suspicious that even the vast majority of Christian and Jewish geologists don’t agree with them. One can’t help but suspect that a literalist reading of the Bible is driving the science – which to my mind is just as objectionable as the opposite phenomenon, in which theistic evolutionists let their evolutionary commitments drive their Biblical exegesis. What we need is good science and good Biblical exegesis, and these are both at their best when not being driven by agendas brought in from other fields.
