Christianity Stuck with Flood Story

On Thursday I had a strange experience. There is a poster on You Tube who has a video about arguing with ark people at the big ark exhibit  in Grant County, Kentucky in 2016. The guy seemed reasonable and he said he next wanted to talk to a Christian about Christianity. I volunteered. I commented saying, "talk to me next." He contacted me and  we arranged to talk on the phone, I want give his name because this is all a private phone. I will try to be fair. I'll call him "Mike." I wont say it was"a perfect phone call" but he tried to be fair as best he could.We did get excited and shouted but we did not degenerate into name calling or insulting. I liked Mike I thought he was a nice guy, but I can't accept his position.

After 20 years of arguing with skeptics (Mike says he is not an atheist but  is skeptical of Christianity) i have seen skeptics (some of them atheists) who have  similar position. His position seemed to be that  because  the God of the Bible wiped out most of humanity in the flood  that God is evil. Since Jesus professed to worship the God of the OT Jesus is wrong and thus Christianity is wrong.

Skeptics of this sort always  seem to think that Christianity invented the flood story. We are stuck with the flood story, we inherited it.  It's not enough that I say it didn't happen. No when it comes to blaming God the flood story is somehow true although generally it's not true. Mike agrees there was never a flood but he still blames God for killing all those people even though he didn't, So   say well God did not authorize the writing of the flood story,  Mike still speaks as though God is to blame.

He asserts that Jesus must have believed in killing all those people because he worshiped the God of the OT  even though he never says that, about killing the people. I pointed out that he is constructing a scenario of what  he thought Jesus would think based upon an absence of pronouncement to the contrary. So Jesus doesn't say  "the flood was wrong." Moreover, he refers to "in the days of Noah" (Matt 24:37) so he must have believed the story was historical. 

Here's the whole passage:

36No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 37As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark.…

This passage contains an admission that Jesus did not have total omniscience. that implies that he could have been wrong about history (because he chose to limit himself). Moreover, he's just speaking from within the myth because he is speaking to people whose world view was limited to that myth. In other words, could be get into Dr. Who's TARDIS and go back to the past and ask Jesus "do you know nuclear physics?" He would probably say "I have cone to save the world from sin not to teach physics." I might refer to "the days of King Arthur" to mean the middle ages without meaning I believe there was a king Arthur.

Mike, though not an atheist, exhibits a strategy I've seen many atheists use. He needs a fail safe. He has to have an issue that absolutely disproves  the Christian view and then he has to link that to Jesus.  In order to pull off his strategy Mike has to assert that we must believe the whole Bible to be Christians. Funny how the skeptics always think they have the right to define other people's faith. He asserts Jesus believed in the flood as historical with no proof that he really did.

If he didn't have the flood story he would find another fail safe. The flood story was known to everyone in that time, it came into Hebrew culture when they were slaves in Babylon and thus the real point of it is faith in God will get us through any crisis. The flood story itself is not the issue. We know the flood story was used in other cultures much older than the Hebrew, They were using the well known myth to make a theological point. God never killed most of the world's population and the point of the story is not that God should kill them. But Mike kept insisting this disproves Christianity because they have the story in the Bible. That is based upon fundamentalist assumptions about the Bible. Don't be a fundamentalist. Problems solved.