Consider the following argument:
- 1) Some goats lived in ancient Greece.
- 2) Socrates was a goat.
- 3) Therefore Socrates lived in ancient Greece.
You should immediately see two flaws in this line of reasoning. First, it’s not true that Socrates was a goat. Socrates was a man. Second, even if Socrates had been a goat, we could not logically deduce from this fact that he had lived in ancient Greece, because only some goats lived in ancient Greece, not all of them. This is an example of a bad argument. And yet, it’s undeniable that Socrates did, in fact, live in ancient Greece.
My point is this: a bad argument that ends with a correct conclusion is still a bad argument. If somebody offered me the argument above and then tried to convince me I should devote my life to the study of Socrates’ philosophy, it’s not very likely that I would pay any attention to them. Rather, I’d assume that the rest of their thinking is as bad as what they’ve showed me, and that it’s probably not worth my time to dig through all the rest of their arguments to see if I can find something worth paying attention to.
This is, or at least it should be, a significant concern for Christians doing apologetics. Bad arguments undermine the credibility of the one making them, and for good reason. As a result of using a bad argument, you may well find that the person you’re talking to has become less willing to consider seriously the claims of Christ than they were before they met you. God is still able, even then, to reach that person, but wouldn’t it be better not to create the situation in the first place?
Many apologists use the fact that flood myths are found among indigenous peoples all around the world to argue that the Bible really is the word of God. My purpose in this article is to explain why that’s a bad argument, and therefore one that should not be used.
Widespread Myths
Now, before I go any further, I need to make it clear that when I talk about “myth” and “mythology” I’m using those terms in an anthropological sense, meaning a sacred narrative, believed to be true, which often plays a central role within a larger belief system (Lehmann, Myers and Moro 2005:52). I specifically do not mean that it is fictitious or false. Myths express sacred truths to believers, and there is nothing about the classification of a story as a myth that prevents it from also being historically accurate. Nor, it must be said, is there anything that requires it to be. The historical accuracy, or lack thereof, of any narrative, is simply not relevant to its being classified as a myth.
The myth of a universal flood is one of the most common sacred stories in the world. It’s found on every continent except Antarctica, among a huge variety of indigenous peoples. There are many regional variations, but generally the flood leaves only a bare handful of survivors who frequently (although certainly not always) stay alive by taking refuge in a box or other container. In some versions of this basic story the survivors are human, in which case everybody in the present world is said to have descended from them. In other cases they are divine or semi-divine beings, and the creation of mankind occurs after the flood. In either case, the flood seems to serve as a type of return to the primordial, watery chaos out of which the world was first formed, and separates an ancient world of supernatural beings from the current world dominated by humans.
Now if we just stop with what I’ve given so far, it does kinda sorta sound like the great flood myth and the flood narrative in Genesis 6-8 might have come from the same source. And a lot of Christian apologists do try to make that connection. But there are some major problems with this approach, and the first one is that the great flood is not the only myth that is found in cultures all over the world. Some other examples of myths that have a worldwide distribution include:
- A man makes a long journey to the world of the dead to try and recover his wife. He finds her, but on the return trip he violates some sort of prohibition, and as a result, he is unable to bring her back to the world of the living (often called the Orpheus myth, after the protagonist in the Greek version of this story).
- The world was originally covered in water until an animal, often a duck or other water bird, dives down to the very bottom and returns with bit of mud under its fingernails. From that bit of mud, all the dry land in the world is created (the earth diver myth).
- People obtain fire by stealing it from a group of divine or semi-divine beings. Often the theft is carried out by animals, who are pursued, and who pass the fire from one to another as a sort of relay (the theft of fire myth).
In addition to worldwide myths, there are many others that are nearly universal within large geographic regions. An example would be the supernatural birth of the monster-slaying hero twins, which is found throughout North America.
This, of course, raises the question, if someone argues that the worldwide flood myth had to have come from an actual worldwide flood, don’t they also have to say that the other worldwide myths came from actual events? Conversely, if the worldwide distribution of the earth diver myth is not taken as evidence that the world was created from mud found underneath the fingernails of some ancient animal, then the worldwide distribution of the flood myth can’t be considered evidence of an actual flood.
Related to this is the question of how long these myths have been passed down. And the honest answer is that nobody has the slightest idea. From ancient literature we can identify that certain myths were known at a few particular times and places, but almost all of what we now know about the distribution of various myths comes from anthropologists and missionaries who were active in 19th century and later. They could record the stories that they heard, but whether those stories were five thousand years old or fifty years old, there’s no way to know. And although it’s undeniable that people often retell stories that they heard from their neighbors, there’s usually no way to tell, after the fact, which direction the borrowing went, or how long it took.
In 1999, Joseph T. Chang published the results of a computer simulation in which he calculated that everybody alive on planet Earth was related through an ancestor who lived roughly 700 years ago. Chang used a very simple model, which didn’t take into account that some populations are more isolated than others. A more careful study in 2004 by Douglas Rohde, Steve Olson, and Joseph T. Chang refined the date of the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) to about 2,000 years ago, and this finding seems to be holding up pretty well (Swamidass 2019). Stories, obviously, can travel much faster than it’s possible for people to have children, so the fact that a particular myth is found all over the world does not necessarily mean that it is very old.
The Origins of Myths
A second problem, and one that is often surprising to people who don’t have a background in anthropology, is that the origin of a particular myth is not a very interesting or useful question. That seems counterintuitive, but it’s easy to understand if you think about your own stories. Every one of us has stories we can tell about interesting or unusual things that we’ve experienced. If you’re like most people, you also know a few stories about things that happened to your parents before you were born. And possibly a few from your grandparents, although most likely not very many. The more generations back you go, the fewer stories you probably know. Why don’t you know those stories? Obviously because nobody ever told them to you. Even extremely interesting stories don’t tend to get passed down once there’s no one alive who remembers the people who experienced them. They don’t become sacred history.
The principle to understand here is that narratives are only passed on if they are in some way important to the living people who hear and tell them. An interesting anecdote that happened to somebody you know is important because of the relationship you have with that person. Similarly, a sacred story – a myth – is only passed on as a sacred story if it is relevant to the lived reality of the people telling and hearing it. And just being old doesn’t make a story sacred. When considering myths, therefore, the question that needs to be asked is not how this or that story got started, or what historical basis it might have, but what it means to the people to whom it is sacred.
Now, this is all assuming we’re talking about an oral narrative. Written texts are a little different. A text that is considered sacred may contain passages that are not especially important to current readers, because the sacred character of the text as a whole keeps people from changing or removing them (for example, Biblical genealogies for many modern Christians). With a sacred written text, the question to be considered is what the story meant at the time it was added to the canon (which may or may not have been the time it was first written down). Oral narratives, however, do not have that kind of connection with a greater whole. They stop being told once they are no longer relevant to any living listeners.
The very first thing the Bible teaches about God is that he is the creator (Genesis 1:1). Humans, created in God’s image, are also wonderfully creative. Inventing stories and telling them to others is part of what we were made to do. A story that resonates with listeners will be preserved and passed on, regardless of whether it is true or fictional. So when you find that a certain myth is present in many different cultures all over the world, that doesn’t prove that it came from an actual event. It proves, rather, that its somehow relevant to people in a huge variety of natural and cultural environments. That’s a very interesting finding. It may be telling us something about the way the human brain works, if we’re clever enough to figure it out. But it doesn’t tell us anything about the origin of the story.
Passing on a Myth
Now, when I say that an oral narrative has to be relevant to the hearers in order to be passed on, I’m not at all claiming that a traditional story can’t somehow be passed down, essentially unchanged, over long periods of time. I’m saying that it won’t be passed down unchanged, or at all for that matter, unless there’s a reason.
In societies without writing, stories can’t sit unread in an archive, waiting for some scholar to rediscover them at a later time. There’s no possibility of a story surviving unless it’s told. And people don’t just randomly talk into the air; storytellers have a purpose (or purposes) in mind. So a story that nobody has a reason to tell will disappear.
The willingness of the teller to make changes in a story depends critically on the purpose for which it is told. If a story is told purely for entertainment, then it doesn’t matter how it changes in the telling, as long as the audience finds the result entertaining (compare the fairy tales of Charles Perrault with their Disney descendants to see a great example of this). If the story is part of a magical ritual, or an invocation to a deity who might be offended if everything isn’t done perfectly, there is a very strong incentive to tell the story exactly the same way each time. It’s not enough just to say the story is sacred, however; it’s the purpose that matters. A sacred story used to instruct children in the proper way to behave might be capable of absorbing some changes, even while other parts of the story remain constant. The only way for an oral story to remain constant over time is if it has to remain constant in order to fulfill the purpose for which it is currently being told.
Of course, God is omnipotent, and he can certainly cause a story to be passed down unchanged if he wants to. But, again, it’s a bad argument to say that God can do something if you don’t present any evidence that he did do it. (And remember that I’m not talking about the Biblical text here, I’m talking about world mythology.)
To sum up, for a myth to be preserved at all, the people who tell the story must find some value in it for their present lives, regardless of what it meant to their ancestors. And to be passed down unchanged, it must be told for some purpose that would be hindered if the story were to be altered.
What all of this means is that mythology, while it might be able to teach us something important about the human brain, is useless for establishing that the Bible is God’s word. And it also suggests something about the way we should approach God’s word.
The Bible is God’s revelation of himself. In Romans 15:4 we’re told, “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope.” Myths are preserved because people find them relevant to the hearers, and incidents are recorded in the Holy Scriptures because God knows that they are relevant to us. Understanding what a particular passage is teaching about the past is of some value, but understanding what it teaches about how God wants to relate to me right now is the main point. And the best way to demonstrate to non-believers that God’s word is true, as I’ve said before, is to obey it.
References Cited
Lehmann, Arthur C., James Myers and Pamela A. Moro
2005 Myth, Symbolism, and Taboo. In Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: an Anthropological Study of the Supernatural 6th Edition, edited by Arthur C. Lehmann, James Myers and Pamela A. Moro, pp. 52-54. McGraw-Hill, New York.
Swamidass, S. Joshua
2019 The Genealogical Adam and Eve: The Surprising Science of Universal Ancestry, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove.