What is the evidence for and against the flood in the Book of Genesis?

Answer 1

Evidence for the biblical FloodThere is no actual evidence for the Flood.

Some apologists claim that the fossils that scientists say were laid down over many millions of years were actually the skeletons of animals and plants killed suddenly by the Flood. However, scientists could never accept this because the fossils are laid down in predictable layers, many of which can be dated by the rocks in which they are found. If so many animals were killed by rising flood waters, we should expect no layering, or at least none that made sense.

There is circumstantial evidence that a traumatic flood event did occur somewhere in or near the Middle East region, because of the many similar legends of a great flood. Ian Wilson (Before the Flood) demonstrates that this is almost certainly a folk memory of a flood event now known to have occurred in 5600 BCE, when the Mediterranean Sea breached the Bosporus and flooded the fertile, low-lying area that is now the Black Sea.

Evidence against the biblical FloodThere is not enough water in the world to cover the earth to the top of the mountains. Local floods occur when water evaporates from the ocean and unusual falls of rain temporarily cover an area of land. But what falls in one area (the land) must come from another area (the sea), and gravity soon returns the flood waters back to the sea. There are too many other scientific proofs that a world-wide flood never occurred, to deal with here.

At the time the Flood is supposed to have occurred and wiped out all life on earth, around 3000 BCE, the ancient Egyptian civilisation (among others) continued undisturbed. Nothing happened that disturbed the lifestype of the Egyptian people.

The Bible itself provides evidence that the story is Noah's Flood is, at least in part, a literary creation, because there are two distinct and complete Flood stories woven together. Scholars have separated the two stories, to show that there are important differences between them - for example in one story there was no distinction between clean and unclean animals and the Flood covered the earth for forty days, while the other says that Noah took two of each unclean animal and seven of each clean animal into the Ark, and the Flood covered the earth for a whole year.