Genesis chapters 6 to 9 shows that man became wicked and corrupt, and God lamented that he had created man. He decided to use rain to destroy humanity and the earth. Nonetheless, he chose to spare the lives of Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives, because he felt they were righteous. God instructed Noah to build an ark 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high to accommodate his family and a male and female pair of every animal on earth. He also instructed Noah to load the ark with enough food for himself, his family, and the various creatures. Noah built the ark exactly as God had commanded, and seven days after Noah, his family, and the animals had locked themselves up in the ark, God made it rain for 40 days and 40 nights. The rain covered the whole earth, including the trees and the mountains, to the point that water was more than 20 feet higher than the highest mountain. After a year and a few months, the flood had completely dried up from the earth and God told Noah and his family to come out of the ark with all the creatures, and they did. Noah built an altar and sacrificed some clean animals and birds as burnt offerings to God. God smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart that he would never again destroy all living creatures as he had done. God set up a rainbow in the cloud to remind him always of his promise.
The Bible says God regretted his action. If you have regret about something you have done, doesn’t that mean, in hindsight, you would have done the same thing differently now that you have a better idea? Some Christians say, ‘Although, God destroyed the world with flood, it is pleasing to know that he started a new generation, and he still loves and protects us in spite of our disobedience and rebellion against him.’ What they are implying is that God is fallible because man’s disobedience took him by surprise, and his solution was more devilish than something the devil would do. Tell me, how on earth did he not know that he wouldn’t get a different result by favoring Noah to start a new beginning? “It makes no sense to start a new building with some of the same old, weak, and crumbling bricks that made your first building collapse” (Aizuojie, 2020x). Take your pick: either God made a mistake or he had no clear plan or the Bible lied about him. By the way, ‘Where did the rest of the people suddenly come from after the flood?’
For those Christians who say, God does not make mistake, he is perfect, he knows what he is doing, we are the ones too dumb to comprehend; my question is, If we are created in God’s image, as the Bible says, shouldn’t the image we reflect see an action as wrong if we perceive the action to be wrong, or is the Bible incorrect to claim that we are created in God’s image? If we are too dumb to comprehend, that means God is also too dumb to comprehend that we are too dumb to comprehend. Moreover, there are places in the Bible where this God, who supposedly knows what he is doing, acted as clueless as a dumb human. “God also thought the people of Jeremiah’s day would repent and return to him, but they did not, to God’s dismay” (Lucey, 2020x).
Perplexingly, none of these Christians would tolerate from our political leaders, 1/10th of the blunders made by the God in the Bible whether or not the leaders say, “Trust us, we know what we are doing.” Even you, who the Bible says is wicked and corrupt, are unlikely to wipe out a society especially if you were the one who gave the people the freewill they’ve used to the best of their abilities to commit the alleged crimes. There shouldn’t be a point in history where an entity who is smarter and more sympathetic than humans could possibly act more devious and dumber than humans. It is only the devil, an entity beneath you, that could do such savagery.
Some Christians argue that, ‘God created everything, and it was good but the trouble started when people rebelled against God. He realized that every inclination in a human’s heart was only evil, so he decided to wipe them out and start a new generation.’ But God was the one who is supposed to have the foresight not to create entities that would give him such a big headache. He is obviously not crafty enough to make sure his good creations remain good. Am I the only one who has trouble trying to understand the point some people are making by blaming human beings for God’s wrongdoing? Do they forget that according to their scripture, God is all-knowing and merciful? This is like blaming faulty products instead of the incompetent manufacturer of the products. Please, know that the God in the Bible is human-made—a fictional character; the real God has nothing to do with the Bible and religion.
Other people say, ‘God didn’t take pleasure in the flood; the Bible only highlights his grief and sorrow regarding the fall of man.’ Give me a break. Okay, maybe they are not talking about the petty, unstable, and temper-tantrum throwing God in the Bible. Until these Christians come to have a firm understanding about the kind of mindset behind the Bible, they won’t stop entangling themselves over every absurd statement in it. What you see is what you get, so don’t try to put your thoughts, even the awkward ones, in their thoughtless mythical writings.
I dabbled into BioLogos website and read their article titled: How should we interpret the Genesis flood account? Among other things, they said that, “Modern people read the Flood story with a completely different perspective on the shape of the Earth and universe. Those who say the story portrays a ‘global’ flood, for instance, are imposing that term upon the text, because the original audience had no idea that the Earth was a globe. Similarly, any speculation about the water sources or ark buoyancy or geologic effects or post-Flood animal migrations or similar questions is missing the point of the story.”
With all due respect BioLogos, you are the one missing the point since you have failed to grasp the awesomeness of God, his divinity, self-respect, and integrity. You denigrate God’s amiable attributes in your attempt to eagerly defend a book that has smeared God’s image from beginning to end. There has never been any place on earth where, even if rain had fallen for 1,000 days and nights could that have resulted in a flood that covered all the trees and mountains. You said, “God did not give the ancient Israelites scientific data.” What has that got to do with the exactitude of the story? Truth is truth; it is timeless. If you believe the Bible is the Word of God, that means he is the one who dictated the words in the Bible; therefore, it ought to remain as truthful as it was five or six thousand years ago. Why didn’t he give the ancient Israelites the scientific data? Does it mean God didn’t know the earth is a sphere when he was dictating the flood story?
The flood story in the Bible is not unique; many similar flood stories had been circulating around before this Noah’s version. Most flood stories are usually about an angry God who destroyed the world with rain and then repopulated it. With a slight variation, especially at the end, each version would try to blend in with the cultural beliefs of the community. “Perhaps the earliest flood story known to man is, The Epic of Gilgamesh. After the death of a friend, Gilgamesh began to search for immortality and met an immortal man named Utnapishtim. Apparently, Utnapishtim had been granted immortality after building a ship called Preserver of Life and surviving the great flood. Like Noah, Utnapishtim brought all of his relatives and all species of creatures aboard his ark to save mankind” (Keep, 2020x).
In the face of evidence, I am glad that many Christians are no longer arguing that the deluge in the Bible is exclusive; nonetheless, they often have something to say to make their scripture worse than it already is. BioLogos says, “This doesn’t mean that Genesis 6-9 is borrowed from the stories of other cultures, but that it is based on a common cultural memory of a watery cataclysm.”
What BioLogos is suggesting is that one account of the flood was not enough for God to let us know how he had destroyed what he had made because he came to realize that they weren’t good, am I right? Why did he settle for Noah’s version instead of the earlier ones? Was it because he had had enough of the copy-cat business? Oh, I see, the people who wrote the earlier versions didn’t see the need to overhype a myth. How on earth was the flood story in the Bible not borrowed from the stories of other cultures? Did the people who wrote the Bible ever encounter a rainfall that had lasted 40 days and 40 nights? Nope. That means they had no common cultural memory of a watery cataclysm on which they based their flood story. No one in the history of humankind has ever experienced a flood covering everywhere to the top of mountains; and, God wouldn’t use people who didn’t know a thing about the globe to send a global message without educating them first about the globe.
BioLogos also says, “The exact nature or date of this historical flood is not important to the meaning of the Genesis account, however, because the purpose of the biblical story is not to give a list of facts about that flood, but to communicate a message about God and humanity to all God’s people throughout history.” So now, the exact nature or date of the Bible flood story is no longer important? Did God or the people who wrote the Bible tell BioLogos that? I wonder what else is no longer important in the Bible. What message was God trying to send with the use of a flood? His incompetence? Anger? Depravity? Tell me, what message?
Genesis 6:6 says, ‘God regretted making human beings on the earth, and he was heartbroken.’ If you still can’t bring yourself to agree that that was an admission of a mistake, then it has to be that he made a mistake for regretting what he had done wrong. If you only agree he was right to regret creating humankind, then creating humankind is a mistake for which his regret was based, correct? Thus, to say God is infallible is a false statement, and if God is fallible he is not divine.
Reality is just too difficult for some people to accept, probably because of all the falsities they were raised to believe. “He regretted,” should mean the same thing whether it is said about God, Satan, or man. If you now try to redefine or spin the meaning of the word regret, for your convenience, aren’t you trying to edit what you perceive to be a flawless book? If you edit a foolproof book, can you still call it a foolproof book? Please, refrain from seeing every argument about the Bible as something that must be won. At this stage of human development, we need to overcome the pettiness of who-wins-and-who-loses. We are not enemies of one another; let us all be on the side of truth and fairness. The Bible is an unedited fiction written by certified liars who knew nothing about geography, astronomy, or God. Don’t let religion take your mind away from you; make a move to finally get yourself out of religious smog. Let’s get this into our minds that a noble God cannot do something ignoble; a perfect being cannot do something imperfect and still maintains the title of a perfect being.
Tony Kingston
Modern Age Movement
Universal Cordial Beliefs
References:
Aizuojie, O. (2020x). God versus religion. modagemov.com
BioLogos. (2021x, Feb. 10). How should we interpret the Genesis flood account? Retrieved from https://biologos.org/common-questions/how-should-we-interpret-the-genesis-flood-account/
Keep, L. (2020x, Feb. 14). A flood of myths and stories. Independent Lens in Beyond the Films. Retrieved from https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/a-flood-of-myths-and-stories/
Lucey, C. (2020x, Aug.). Does God Make Mistakes? Retrieved from https://www.christianity.com/wiki/god/does-god-make-mistakes.html
