I don't think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.
A very plausible theory concerning how the Biblical flood may have occurred, was first described in the research published in the 1970's by oceanographer Dr. Kenneth J. Hsu, and then by the more recent
research paper published in
Nature in 2009 by Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, is that it was actually a massive flood that affected ONLY the entire Mediterranean Ocean basin, which was where mankind is thought to have orginated.
This theory is widely supported by
considerable geologic evidence, which suggests that the northward movement of the African plate once closed off the Gibraltar Strait. Since more water evaporates off the surface of the Mediterranean Ocean than flows into it from rivers, closure of the Straits of Gibraltar would have caused the Mediterranean to dry up- forcing the early civilizations that lived in this area to move down into the basin as the water level dropped and dropped and dropped.
Eventually, continuing plate motion caused downwarping of the earth's crust at Gibraltar, allowing Atlantic ocean water to catastrophically flow back in and fill the Mediterranean Ocean basin- which would have wiped out all the people living there.
The possibility of a massive, but not global, flood that wiped out all of civilization that existed at that time may be supported by a verse in the New Testament:
2 Peter 2:
5 if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people. So here, the Bible appears to be referring to only the ancient world where people lived, and not the entire earth.
Here is a well written summary, complete with many references, that explains this further:
The Mediterranean Flood.
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The early history of the earth, when plate tectonic activity first started, may provide another, probably less plausible, explanation of how the Biblical flood may have occurred.
When the Chinese climbed Chomolunga (as they call Everest) in 1975, they brought back rocks from the summit that had fossil shells- indicating that either ocean water had covered the summit, or that the summit rocks were originally formed below sea level.
Plate tectonic theory today holds that the latter is most likely true- that the rocks that make up the Himalayas were originally formed in a shallow sea (the Tethys Sea) sandwiched between the Indian and Asian continents, and were pushed up as these two land masses collided.
But what is interesting here is that before plate tectonic activity started, mountain building processes were not yet active, and so the earth must have been quite flat. As a matter of fact, if ocean water was as abundant as it now is, the entire surface of the earth may originally have been entirely below sea level- and the first dry land would only have formed after plate tectonic activity started.
So if the Biblical flood had occurred just after the first land mass appeared above the ocean surface, it wouldn't have taken much of a storm to entirely inundate the new land area; much like Bangladesh is so badly flooded when an Indian ocean typhoon or tsunami occurs.
Now paleontologists are quick to point out that there is no evidence that people were present on the new land when the first continent was formed, so linking Noah's adventure to an early period of the earth's history, when only a small amount of easily-flooded dry land was available, is speculative.
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So my point here is to show that the description of the Biblical flood is a classic example of where a better interpretation of the Bible and a better understanding of science has led to a reconciliation of ideas that at one point seemed diametrically opposite.
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