The Truth of Christ does not depend upon the flood (1)

I was cleaning out old bookmarks and I came across a link to a "debate" I had with an atheist named Miklos Jako a couple of years ago. We spoke by phone and he put it on his website.[1] It was not a good debate. My big mistake was in not demanding set timed speaches. We should have each recieved 10 minutes to speak without being imterup[pted. Then five minutes rebuttles also uninterrupted. We did not do this and thus he was able to disrupt all my explanations and to garble complex positions with innuendo and double standards.

The major issue was the flood. He insissts the flood never happened thus Christianity is false. His title is "The flood story is not true but Christianity is." That is his characterization of my position. He is attacking my position.My position is that the flood is mythology. The fact that there are myths aboung Christian sacred writtings is not a dispropf of  the Gospel. There can be no flood and Jesus still died for our sins and rose from the dead. His view is that the flood is false, therefore, Christianity is false. Jako is a very lieralistic thinker. He can't appreciate complex positions and he would not allow me to explain my ideas.

I will not waste time trying to prove my assertions about his unfair and illogical arguments, I don't care. I am going to present what I think is the best argument he makes, the essence of what he is trying to say. I present this in it's best light then show what is wrong with it.

I think what he's really trying to say is that the vast majority of Christians believe in the kind of God who is claimed to have drowned most of the world. This shows Christianity has the kindo  idea of God that is just wrong headed. If God did exist he would not be that kind of God. Belief in the kind of God who would drown most life on Earth is indicative of falsehood. That the flood is part of Christian mythos implies that Christianity is wrong. This is a simplistic notion that reduces religious belief to a straw man argument. He won't allow anyone to believe in other versions of Christiatiy, one must cling to the version of Christianity against which he rebelled. So one has no option to develp a more sophisticated understanding because Christianity must be a priori stupid and untneable or it is not Christianity.

He probably senses the wrong nature of this view and tries to ground it in the requirment that Christians must follow Jesus, and Jesus believed in the flood. I argued that this is debatable but he insisted we only understand Jesus' words in one way.I tried to show my own interpretation but he kept interrupting,  I will deal with this question in part 2.

One indication of the foolishness of his only one kind of Christianity theory is the fact that major theological  traditions disagree and reject the idea that one must believe in the flood.

Fabio Paolo Barbier
Catholic layman
Answered Aug 29, 2018

Pope Pius XII said clearly that the early stories of the Bible were intended to teach metaphysical truths in terms suited for unsophisticated, early men. The Church has NEVER taken the early books of the Bible as sources of historical and scientific truth; for instance, it rejected very early any attempt to base the understanding of physics and geography on the Bible (Cosmas Indikopleustes, in the sixth century, tried to set up a Genesis-based geography, and his effort was rejected), instead accepting the rejected), instead accepting the results of Greek mathematics and astronomy. As a result, all Christians from the sixth century knew that the world was round, and that it was minuscule as compared with the size of the heavens. The attempt to turn the Bible into a source of factual truth is a modern disease, going back to the 1890s and to a set of books called Fundamentals (hence “fundamentalism).[2]

How foolish to claim it's not Christian when Popes and major theologians agree with it.No creed includes the literal truth of the flood as a tenet of faith. Obviously then doubting the historical nature of the flood does not stand opposed to Christian belief.

The ccommentator at biologos thinks there are clues in the text kf Genesis that it's not litteral.

The Genesis Flood story contains many literary clues that its writers (and original audience) were not intended to narrate an actual series of events. The story employs the literary device known as “hyperbole” throughout, describing a massive ark which holds representatives of “every living creature on Earth”, and a flood which flows over the tops of the highest mountains in the world. These are not meant to challenge readers to figure out the practicality of such descriptions, but rather they are important clues that we are dealing with a theological story rather than ancient journalism.[3]

notes

[1] Miklos Jako,"The Flood Story Is Not True, But Christianity IS," youtube video (Dec 20, 2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yJZJKjw2Msacess Feb 25, 2022

[2]Fabio Paolo Barbieri."Does the Catholic church believe that the great flood and Noah's ark were real?" Quora, website (Aug 29, 2018) https://www.quora.com/Does-the-Catholic-church-believe-that-great-flood-and-Noahs-ark-were-realacess Feb 25, 2022

Barbieri:BA in Social Anthropology & Religious Studies (college major), School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London (SOAS)Graduated 1990 2.5M content views35.6K this month.

[3]staff, "How should we interpret the Genesis flood account?" Biologos. (2019) https://biologos.org/common-questions/how-should-we-interpret-the-genesis-flood-account/acess Feb 25, 2022