Oh, but listening to the Christian Scientist prove their theories with the Bible can be soooo entertaining. I particulalry like the explaination for dinosaur bones and the flood when the Earth's "top" surface collapsed onto the "world" beneath the "top" surface. I think they were the reason Pope John Paul II's address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: "Pope Says Evolution Compatible with Faith" and quoted at stating evolution was "more than a hypothesis." (funny that he was essentially restating what Pope Pius XII stated 50 years earlier in response to Darwinism).
As to The Flood: that story shows up in many cultures around the globe long before Judaism or Christianity reached them. Personally, I think that is a hold over from prehistoric times (prior to 3500 BCE) when the last ice age ended and the oceans rose. There is evidence that the Black Sea was a fresh water ocean with a much lower sea level (fossils of fresh water species and possible remnants of early human fishing villages) until around 5600 BCE when the encroaching Mediterranean broached the Bosporus (by one theory, perhaps much earlier)
The event flooded 60,000 mile² (155,000 km²) of land and significantly expanded the Black Sea shoreline to the north and west. Ryan and Pitman wrote:
"Ten cubic miles [42 km³] of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls. …The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days."
Now, some dispute Ryan and Pitman's theory and timeline, but there is a lot of evidence to the lower sea levels and freshwater in the Black Sea as some point between the last ice age and 5600 BCE.
Certainly the rising seas and flooding fishing villages was a long term and impressive event (especially at the Bosporus) that effected man to the point that it would be story retold through the ages until versions of it finally made their way to written work.
It followed us like many things from those days: Fear of the dark, most people's attraction to gazing into firelight, fight or flight response. Some small part of early man remains a part of most of us in some way. Racial memory is pretty much dismissed by modern psychologists, but early man probably possessed the ability -- Homo habilis use of the 'Oldowan tools', or hand axe, consistently, and unchanged, for 2 million years is probably a good example.
But in any case, from the retelling of stories around camp fires for generations until finally being written down or some racial memory, the story or theme of The Flood made it's way into many religions and cultures around the world.
I stay Agnostic. There is good and bad to be found in most religions, and as most religions throughout history have been closely tied to politics and ruling over others.... and as I don't trust politicians from any age..... I take anything written in religion with a truckload of salt.
