Last night, as I wandered aimlessly through the dark alleyways of the internet, I stumbled across a comment made by a vanishing breed: A true believer in the great global flood story recorded in the Old Testament. Someone who believes the story of Noah’s Ark literally happened.

What interests me about this was an approximate date was given, circa 2400 bc. I’d seen that before, and a quick google search shows that it’s a common year given by flood believers. If there was any method used to calculate this date, it wasn’t mentioned in my brief search. Perhaps generations named in the bible, like Bishop Ussher counting begats to estimate the age of the Earth?

Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more ways I realized how small and provincial the world depicted in the story is. If the entire world had been flooded around 2400bc, killing nearly all land-based life and forcing a global re-population, it wouldn’t just be people from a few scholarly disciplines who knew about it, everyone would know it happened. Read the rest of this entry →