Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
lines, the Catholic priest Ernst Böklen argued that the ark represented the moon serenely
sailing across the heavenly ocean, with the moon god Noah at the helm.
After Sigmund Freud, interpretations changed. Sometimes a flood was not just a flood.
One of Freud's earliest disciples, Otto Rank, described flood myths as urination fantasies.
Rank went on to distinguish simple versions from those involving more elaborate birth or
sexual fantasies. In his view, primitive people tended to embrace garden-variety urination
myths, whereas the story of Noah's Flood represented the supreme example of a complex
myth that had it all. The urinary origin of the flood was obvious enough to Rank, and to
him the ark clearly represented the maternal womb, so disembarkation represented both
rebirth and an invitation to procreate and repopulate the world. Other psychoanalytical ap-
proaches have also been applied to flood myths, but there is no way to either prove or dis-
prove them—no matter how insightful or how ludicrous they may seem.
A key question is whether geology can explain flood myths and, in particular, if Noah's
Flood could have been a local Mesopotamian flood that swamped the lowlands between
the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. After the catastrophic floods that devastated nineteenth-
century Baghdad, this possibility became far more plausible. For the most part, however,
geologists avoided wading very far into biblical criticism, content to accept the premise
that the story of Noah's Flood described a regional flood.
It took an Anglican bishop to push the idea that Noah's Flood was pure fiction. John Wil-
liam Colenso, a missionary in southern Africa who became Bishop of Natal, was greatly
influenced by biblical criticism, geology, and biogeography. In
The Pentateuch and Book
of Joshua Critically Examined
, published in 1864, Bishop Colenso reviewed the problems
raised by believing that the flood story was true. According to the description of the Garden
of Eden, the same rivers flowed in the same places both before and after the Great Flood,
suggesting that Noah's Flood did little to change Earth's surface. The logistics of getting
animals to and from the ark raised additional issues, as did the question of how the ark
could have space for them all. But Colenso pointed out yet another conundrum. How could
saving a single pair ensure the survival of species that lived in herds, like buffalo, or those
that lived in hives, like bees? Without the resolution of these issues, how could people stake
their spiritual salvation on belief in a global flood?
