Sometimes people say: However can you Christians believe in the flood?
Well: we can’t prove it; we don’t have videos of it – and that goes for history in general. But bottom line: for very good, solid reasons we’ve come to believe Jesus is God; and then as His disciples, we trust His unambiguous teaching of the reliability of old testament history. Which includes, that the flood was every bit as real as the second coming will be. (Matthew 24:37: `as it was… so it will be`.)
But we aren’t being mindless about this. Amazingly, races all over the world have flood stories. Stephen Caesar, in http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2008/01/09/A-Localized-Flood.aspx#Article gives a great summary. (Or if you want a mindbogglingly thorough compilation, try http://www.talkorigins.org/pdf/flood-myths.pdf.) This does surely imply that the flood was a real, historical event.
However, Caesar says this shows the `entire world must have suffered a devastating flood`; I’d have thought it showed only that our entire race suffered a devastating flood. The Bible doesn’t make clear how widespread or regional it was. A verse like Genesis 7:19 can be speaking of either `mountains` or `hills`; the word translated `earth` in 6:17 or 7:3 is in many other places translated `land` (over 1400 times) or `country`; and we should compare the way Luke 2:1, Acts 2:5 or Colossians 1:23 speak of `all the world`, or `every nation under heaven`, when both Luke and Paul knew full well they were referring only to their own, Roman world, and that there were many nations outside the Roman empire. (Have a look at www.godandscience.org/apologetics/localflood.html, or Roger Forster’s Reason, Science and Faith.)
So personally I suspect Bible teachers like Tim Keller may be right to suggest it was regional, whatever part may have been played by tsunamis etc in bringing God’s judgment on our race as a whole. If Keller and others are right, it deals with most questions sceptics ask; like how all the animals fitted into the ark, or how the tinier marsupials got back across the sea to Australia, and the South American sloth to its habitat. And then the gathering to safety of the animals becomes a prophetic act, a final vivid warning from God.
And let me end with a personal `maybe maybe`, about the early date at which humans seem to have got to the Americas and Australia. This implies the flood may have been very early indeed. I’m fascinated by how current genetic science suggests that at one early stage much of our race was nearly wiped out, reduced down to a very small number of people; was this the flood? If so, if current science is right, we may be looking at the flood being, say, 70,000 years ago. It might also possibly mean that Eden was in Africa (often called Cush, cf Gen 2:13). That is, when people reached the middle east they named rivers they saw there after the African rivers in their most important stories, in Gen 2:14. For more on this, see the post in this section `Genesis 2, Adam and Eve: when and where?`
Who knows! What’s clear is this: we’ve needed Christian cosmologists and biologists to help us with the science-and-faith debates; what we need to actually pray for now is geneticists who believe the Bible is 150% true, and can see how that fits with true science…
