Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The impossible voyage of Noah's Ark

Some problems for literalism about the Flood story.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

can't the same reasoning be used to show that the Jesus story ought to be metaphorical?

Victor Reppert said...

Your point is an interesting one. One would have to readily concede that there are questions about the use of the term "impossible" in the title. The story of Noah, like the story of Jesus, is naturalistically impossible, as it essentially involves divine activity, and showing it to be impossible in that sense is therefore uninteresting. But in the Noah case, knowing what we know about our globe now, you have to have God performing a lot of extra miracles in addition to the primary one mentioned in order to pull this off. I suppose God could have caused the ark to be "dimensionally transcendental," meaning that like Dr. Who's TARDIS and the Narnian stable, it's bigger on the inside than on the outside. Noah supposed gathers two of every species, but that would take more than even a Noachian lifetime to do, and he's got to go all over the world, so does God bring the animals to him using the Enterprise's tractor beams? And then maybe there's a transporter inside the ark, and when it's all done it's "beam me back to the tip of South America, Scotty! And don't beam me into solid rock." But how far can we go in propping up the literal details of this story with fantasy and science fiction?

Blue Devil Knight said...

Wow that creation/evolution journal brings back memories. I used to subscribe to the print version back in the day, when I was a testy little undergrad.