I agree that is what the reader at the time would have understood - but that is not quite the same as saying that the text requires the flood to have truely destroyed all animal life on Earth - it just means it describes all the life where the audience knew life to be.

/Bevin

It is difficult to imagine how "everything that has the breath of life," and "everything under heaven" could be construed to mean anything else.

The purpose was to deal with sin, and specifically, corruption and violence. In terms of the narrative, this was described in Gen. 4:19-24, the "Song of Lamech."

To deal with that, the Flood would have to destroy all land-based animal life.

This is one of the metaphysical problems with evolution. It relies on violence, suffering, and death. "Survival of the fittest" is in fact the extermination, usually violent, of all the rest. It requires that God not only be tolerant of violence and suffering, but that he employs it to improve organisms.

We abhor violence and suffering, even in animals. Yet God is supposed to have instituted it and relied on it for millions of years.

Oh? Why is it important to destroy all the land-based forms of life, when the ocean-based ones are even more predicated on predatorship?

/Bevin

In terms of the narrarive, three reasons, actually.

1. Ancient people knew little of what went on beneath the waves. Your comment is an injection of 21st century knowledge into the ancient world.
2. The Sea was considered the realm of chaos, where the sea-serpent/behemoth/leviathan/chaos dragon ruled. The flood of violence and evil on land essentially prefigured the violent flood of chaotic waters.

Isaiah 27 gives one of several word pictures that portray the conflict between God and the evil sea serpent. Describing this eschatological event, it says:


3. The earth (ordered realm) is where Man dwelt. The antedeluvians, by spreading corruption and violence throughout their realm, the dry land, invited/precipitated (no pun intended) the Flood.

In Genesis, Man is given dominion over the Earth. When Man rebels against God, the Earth rebels against Man. Man's dominion mirrors man's character. So Man's sin and violence pervades his dominion, and that vile influence must be purged, as far as is compatible with God's other purposes (salvation of Man, for example).

The serpent had only tempted Eve to become "as God," but Lamech boldly claims superiority. He provides two wives for himslef, where God only gave one to Adam; and he avenges himself even more than God promised to avenge Cain. When "The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time," (Gen 6:5), God decides to eliminate this pervasive evil.

Violence was not God's original plan, not part of it.

Your assessment of their ability to reason is an ad hominen attack on the person rather than dealing logically with their position. You reject everything someone may say on diverse topics because of one topic with which you disagree. That is being close minded.

I reject evolutionary interpretation of data. I do not reject the data itself, nor the science done to obtain data. Most scientists do commendable, competent science, and I read and study journals and reports on a regular basis. It is not the data nor the science, but evolutionary, naturalistic interpretations that are irrelevant to creationism and a creationary cataclysmic model.

One of the most interesting persons I’ve read and from whom I’ve learned a lot and, in fact, have obtained some of my best material from was self proclaimed atheist and Marxist, paleontologist Stephen J. Gould, PhD. He was a character and a great and prolific writer. While I disagree with his materialistic religion and his politics, I’ve enjoyed reading his books, papers and articles. He was as forthright about the shortcomings of evolutionism, as he was critical about creationism. And he knew more about creationism correctly than nearly any other evolutionist I’ve ever read. Anti-creationists like him are few and very far between. I would like to have known him.

Allen

Insightful - I hadn't thought of it this way before. You are seeing, in the Flood, very symbolic elements rather than physical realities.

Such symbolic elements, to me, are more suggestive of a morality tale than they are of a scientific description - the kind of thing you would expect to find in Homer rather than Lyell.

/Bevin

An action or description can--perhaps must--be both symbolic and real at the same time. All words are symbols, whether used as metaphor or literal description.

The Flood is a symbolic action, a signifying reality. Sin and violence pervaded creation. That was real. Lamech's song is probably accurate, but it also symbolizes the violence and corruption. God decides to wipe out all but a select few and start over again. He does so. People and animals really died. The Flood narrative explains why this horrendous loss of life was necessary-- it was a radical treatment for a virulent disease.

The crucifixion is both a symbolic and a real event.

Earlier, you scoffed at "meaning in the universe." These 'symbolic' explanations provide exactly that-- meaning for otherwise inexplicable disasters. "Why would God destroy so many lives?" The typical Christian response today is denial: "God doesn't (or wouldn't, if he existed) do such a thing." Or simply deny the authority of the Bible. But these explanations supply two crucial ingredients: purpose and hope.

So, of course Genesis is rich in figurative language. It is an attempt to explain complex cosmic and natural phenomena to 15th century B.C. nomads.

How would you explain a DVD to Moses? Or tectonic movement? How about undersea vulcanism and earthquakes resulting in tsunamis? to a culture who sees the Earth as a cosmic egg.


The Cosmic Egg
The Earth (ordered realm) as the yolk. Surrounded by water(the eggwhite) above the Earth and below the Earth. The visible water of rivers (shaped like a serpent, by the way) and seas (the wave ridges often pictured as the serrated scales on the back of a great sea-serpent/chaos dragon in ancient iconography) below and around the Earth/yolk. The invisible waters of the heavens above the Earth/yolk. There are windows in the top of the eggshell, letting in light from the stars.

This language pervades the OT, especially Genesis. Here's from Exodus 20:11 "11 For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them . . . ."

Even Revelation echoes this, for example in 5:13 "And every created thing which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all things in them,"

Or how about the description of the Flood, Gen. 7:11,12 "11In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened."

The waters that had been separated on the second day of Creation allowing the dry land to appear, come back together at the Flood, the great de-Creation. This heralds a re-Creation, which in fact occurs, but in a different way than the first. I'll leave that for another time.

When you say this, what I hear in my head is "they provide emotionally comforting nonsense to people who aren't comfortable with the randomness of the universe".

To me, if you are stupid enough to walk across an open field in a thunder storm, and you get hit by lightening, it is simply bad luck. If there is two of you, and only one gets hit, that is simply luck also. I don't need a 'more satisfactory' explanation based around (a) the evil one got hit, punishing him for his sins, or (b) the good one got hit, giving the evil one chance to repent.



I do not regard either of these as critical. I don't even understand the idea of 'purpose', and 'hope' is something which should not be used to measure the correctness of a hypothesis, because it has no correlation with the hypothesis' ability to predict the future.

I regard such explanations (good guy/bad guy/God's Will/...) of events are bogus anyway, because they fail what is for me the only test that matters - the ability to predict the future.

You seem to me to be the opposite end of the spectrum - you seem to be much more concerned about emotionally satifying answers than about the ability of those answers to predict the future.



I agree.

I think we just disagree on how over-simplified the account is from what physically happened.

/Bevin

That is increasingly clear in your many posts.



My world is not limited to 'measuring the correctness of hypotheses.'



As though that matters.



Then you need a new paradigm.

Only God can predict the future. At the end of life, understanding science won't bring personal peace. It isn't wrong to understand science but we all need so much more.