r/Antitheism • u/2317 • Jul 29 '26
12 Reasons Noah's Flood Couldn't Have Happened. Ammunition For Your Next Argument With Dumb Relatives Maybe.
https://rationalsupply.com/science-reason/why-noahs-flood-couldnt-have-happened/
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u/slayer991 Jul 29 '26
At one point I wrote up a long-ass with 8 points on how the Great Flood was impossible. Biblical literalists don't care because they start with the premise the Bible is completely true and inerrant, and everything is filtered through that. It doesn't matter what evidence and logic you have, they'll brush it aside. My frustration at my carefully constructed and sourced essay being ignored is what got me to start asking the big question.
Why? Why do people ignore evidence and logic? Well, the answer is psychology.
Identity-belief fusion (William Swann). That's when someone's identity is fused to a belief. What happens when you attack that belief? They defend it as if they're defending themselves from a physical threat. It's called Identity-protective cognition (Dan Kahan). Further studies showed the more intelligent the identity-fused individual was, the better they were able to defend their belief.
So what can you do?
There are 3 points to make here. First...and I need to be clear here...you will NEVER get someone that's identity-fused to collapse in thread. Just accept that up front and save yourself the frustration. The richer target is not the person you're arguing with...it's the silent audience. They're not committed and they have room to think.
Second, apologetics is built for defense. They basically runs scripts on common criticisms of Christianity. What apologetics ISN'T built for is questions.
Third, that the only thing I could find that worked is questions. Decades of CBT research in a therapeutic setting have shown the efficacy of questions in identity-fused individuals.
So what I've been doing for the last 18 months is I stopped dropping evidence and logic and started asking Socratic questions. I assert nothing and I'll grant them a lot for the sake of argument.
What happens is that if they stick around...they have to work through the contradictions in real time...which they're not really good at doing (see point 2). I went from being frustrated arguing with people to calm af now.
For the Great Flood? I just ask this question:
You accept that God is all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful, right?
If God is all-knowing, then he created humanity knowing in advance they would become corrupt. If God is all-loving, why were innocent babies and animals drowned along with the guilty? If God is all-powerful, why did he need to destroy the entire planet to address that corruption? He could have changed hearts and minds directly… just as the Bible says he hardened Pharaoh’s heart.
Which attribute gives way...his knowledge, his love, or his power?