Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Unlike geologists such as Lyell, Colenso didn't buy the idea of a local flood. In his view,
that was the easy way out. Why did birds even need to be on the ark at all when they could
have simply flown off to find dry land? No, a local flood didn't make sense either. The
bishop acknowledged that the Bible was clear in implying a universal flood. However, he
just thought that the Bible was wrong. Noah's Flood was just a good story.
Unsurprisingly, Colenso's idea was not popular among Christian theologians. In the
1860s and 1870s, his contemporaries widely endorsed the idea of a local flood in response
to the geological evidence uncovered in the first half of the century. In 1863, the authorit-
ative
Dictionary of the Bible
dismissed the notion of a universal flood and suggested that a
local flood in the lower valley of the Euphrates River provided an interpretation more com-
patible with geological evidence.
Secure in their faith that science and rational thought were God-given tools that could
illuminate biblical interpretation, theologians from mainstream denominations acknow-
ledged that if geology supplied evidence of only a local deluge, they would reinterpret
scripture. The influential Cambridge Divinity professor Herbert Ryle expounded the belief
that science was not the enemy of faith, even if the available scientific evidence required
more nuanced interpretations of Genesis.
It must be the maxim of all reverent exposition to treat Science as the friend and not as the foe of Divine Revelation.
It may be that Science seems to be but a disappointing friend when it shows the path of traditional interpretation
to be no longer practicable. But the utterance of truth is the proof of purest friendship; and Science, if it closes one
way, guides us to another which hitherto has been hid from view.
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Ryle saw the Babylonian flood story as an ancient legend that had been incorporated into
Jewish lore. The primary differences between the Babylonian and biblical stories corres-
ponded to basic contrasts in religious thought. The moral purpose and purity of the biblical
version distinguished it from polytheistic Babylonian versions. Still, Ryle saw enough dif-
ferences in the narratives to think the Jews did not adopt the Babylonian flood story during
their captivity. They had their own story.
In his view, the resolution to the question of how two original versions of the same story
arose lay in a common ancestral tradition of a disastrous local flood that submerged the
Mesopotamian world between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
