{"id":4079,"date":"2007-09-09T12:27:46","date_gmt":"2007-09-09T16:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=4079"},"modified":"2007-10-13T21:30:32","modified_gmt":"2007-10-14T01:30:32","slug":"dialogue-flood-article","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2007\/09\/dialogue-flood-article\/","title":{"rendered":"Dialogue Flood Article"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a vague recollection of President Benson telling a story about how (not) to do missionary work: he compared it to trying to convince a young girl to replace the doll she had with the doll you were offering her. He pointed out that ripping the head off of her doll to reveal its inferior contents may not be the most successful approach; you would be far better off in extolling the virtues of the doll you wanted her to play with. Good advice. I wish White and Thomas had followed it in their recent Dialogue article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Instead, they lay out the case for why a universal flood is scientifically impossible–a position for which the evidence is so overwhelming that it is akin to ripping the head off of a favored doll. My fear is that the naive reader of scripture will respond to this full frontal assault in one of two ways: they will either give up on the authority of the text (“well, if it is impossible, then I guess it is just another primitive folk tale”) or they will become entrenched in their opposition to science (if you have a strong stomach, click here<\/a> to see where this attitude can lead). Neither of these is a good–or even necessary–outcome.<\/p>\n

A better approach is to lay the groundwork for a non-traditional reading of the Bible in a way that a traditionalist can accept. This topic is on my mind as I did it this week as I taught the first session in a year-long Institute class on Genesis. I began with a statement (that, unfortunately, I can’t find the citation for) that the purpose of Genesis is to tell “not how it was, but why it is.” I used the story of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib as an example. President Kimball taught that “the story of the rib, of course, is figurative” (President Spencer W. Kimball, “The Blessings and Responsibilities of Womanhood,” Ensign, March 1976, page 70f.) In other words, this rib story is not <\/strong> “how it was.” <\/p>\n

Elder Nelson taught, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I presume another bone could have been used, but the rib, coming as it does from the side, seems to denote partnership. The rib signifies neither dominion nor subservience, but a lateral relationship as partners, to work and to live, side by side.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Elder Russell M. Nelson, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Lessons from Eve,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Ensign, Nov. 1987, page 86f.) In other words, the rib story is<\/strong> “why it is.” (Or, at least, “how it should be.” But that’s a topic for another post.) <\/p>\n

With this gentle encouragement, my class was more than willing to set aside factual\/historical\/scientific questions and focus on the symbolic meaning and moral implications of the text. A woman who I regard as a staunch traditionalist pointed out that God taught Moses the same lesson when Moses asked, “Tell me, I pray thee, why these things [i.e., the earth and its inhabitants] are so, and by what thou madest them?” (Moses 1:30) and God responded, “For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me.” In other words: I’ll tell you why<\/em> I created them, but not how<\/em>. (Although we are promised in D & C 101: 33 that, at the Second Coming, we will learn “things of the earth, by which it was made.” Which, incidentally, implies that we currently don’t have revealed how the earth was made.)<\/p>\n

This is a long way to make a short point: don’t burst anyone’s bubble unless you have a new balloon to offer in hand. Most people are more or less relieved to be offered a new and better balloon: they don’t have to read a dozen pages in Dialogue on the scientific impossibility of a worldwide flood to get that a worldwide flood defies the laws of nature. What they need are not facts but rather a framework for incorporating the facts that they already suspect.<\/p>\n

One more point on that: the pages of scientific proof fall flat in the face of a very simple argument: “God could have altered (or perhaps: applied a better understanding than we currently have of) these laws and a universal flood could indeed have happened.” While I personally am not persuaded by this argument, I’m not sure how people who believe in a resurrection could easily dismiss it. It is hard to imagine that a faithful LDS reader would be persuaded by a Dialogue article on the scientific impossibility of bodily resurrection; similarly, a believer in the universal flood is likely to remain unconvinced by White and Thomas’ article.<\/p>\n

What would have been more persuasive would have been to show how the story itself<\/em> allows for the interpretation of the flood as geographically limited. White and Thomas do acknowledge this when they write:<\/p>\n

For example, some recent commentators have argued that the Hebrew word \u00e2\u20ac\u2122eretz is translated in the King James Version both as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153land\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153earth,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but twice as often as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153land,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as in such phrases as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the land of Canaan\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Exod. 6:4), \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the land of Egypt\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Gen. 41:33) or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the land which he promised them\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Deut. 9:28). Thus, they argue, the miraculous rainfall may have been localized to the whole face of a certain land or
\nlands and need not necessarily refer to the entire planet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But they bury it as an aside instead of making it the centerpiece of their article. (They also miss the best example: unless you believe that Cain was removed from the planet [see Genesis 4:11], then you see the need to sometimes translate ‘eretz as ‘land’ instead of ‘earth.’) The idea that faithfulness to the story as written does not<\/em> require belief in a universal flood (or six-24-hour-period creation, etc., etc.) is a huge and important idea. (Hugh Nibley suggested another option: that the [universal] flood story is literally true from Noah’s perspective<\/em>. This seems reasonable to me, and sets us up for some interesting thoughts when, in the next chapter, Lot’s daughters {update: I had originally put “Noah” instead of “Lot;” what I meant to say was that there are numerous similarities between Noah drunk with his sons and Lot drunk with his daughters} interpret the local absence of males as a universal absence. But again I digress.)<\/p>\n

Another flaw in White and Thomas’ approach is that, in their effort to show that the flood story is not scientifically accurate, they assume that it is scientifically accurate. An example:<\/p>\n

Noah built an actual ark and took with him his family, seven each of every ritually clean \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bird, beast, and creeping thing,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and two each of all ritually unclean birds, beasts, and creeping things (Gen. 7:2).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While this literalist reading is one possibility, a more compelling reading relies on ancient ideas of number symbolism: the Old Testament itself has already established, before the flood story, a strong inclination to treat numbers symbolically. For example, Genesis 2:1-3, a text that establishes the importance of the seventh day, repeats the word ‘seven’ three times, each time in a sentence with seven words. In this case, not just the content<\/em> but also the form<\/em> work to persuade the reader that the seventh day is a day of completion. In fact, “completion” or “perfection” are the best shorthand understandings of the symbolism of the number seven, and it is just as consonant (if not more) with the flood text itself to read the “seven” animals as a representation of a “complete” or “perfect” number of animals as it is to read it as being ‘one more than six.’<\/p>\n

I applaud White and Thomas’ effort to follow the advice (which they quote) from Elder Widtsoe that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The scriptures must be read intelligently.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d [I also admire their patience and fortitude; they note: “After some three years and about five major revisions to suit the editor, BYU Studies essentially accepted the article. After yet another review by another panel, the article was rejected.”] But in addition to being read intelligently, the scriptures must also be taught intelligently. And in trying to disprove a universal flood by scientific means instead of by persuading the audience that the text itself doesn’t require (or even prefer) that reading, they have, so to speak, missed the boat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a vague recollection of President Benson telling a story about how (not) to do missionary work: he compared it to trying to convince a young girl to replace the doll she had with the doll you were offering her. He pointed out that ripping the head off of her doll to reveal its inferior contents may not be the most successful approach; you would be far better off in extolling the virtues of the doll you wanted her to play with. Good advice. I wish White and Thomas had followed it in their recent Dialogue article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}