Did Noah's Flood Really Happen?

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This study is not the first to suggest that an actual deluge occurred in biblical times. In his 1996 book "The Time Before History," English science writer Colin Tudge details a number of archeological and geologic studies (mainly involving the time-dating of rare isotopes) that support the notion of a huge deluge during the very period when our ancestors were just developing systems of writing. Likely cause? The enormous glaciers of the Pleistocene ice age began to retreat approximately 10,000 years ago, and the melting took several millennia. Researchers think that some of the largest continental-scale glaciers, as they retreated, created "ice dams" that held back vast seas of melt water. When these dams broke, there would have been unimaginable inundations covering hundreds of miles.

Such a prospect isn't exactly 40 days and nights of rain, but it's awfully close. If there were ice-dam floods at the end of the last ice age, they would have occurred all over the world, and thus many faiths and cultures might have accounts of an ancient horrible deluge.

Commentators often point out that the Flood of the Bible sounds awfully similar to the large-scale deluge depicted in the Sumerian epic poem Gilgamesh, written about 5,000 years ago, and to deluge accounts found in cultures in Africa and Asia as well. The similarity of deluge accounts, they usually claim, suggests that these cultures have simply borrowed a myth from each other. This logic seems inverted. If many cultures in many places have ancient beliefs that an awful flood occurred, doesn't this unanimity increase the chance that the accounts are true? Maybe Sumerians, Hebrews, Asians and Africans all independently developed flood accounts because that's what happened.

There are other hard-science studies suggesting biblical events actually happened. About a decade ago, archeologists found evidence that an ancient Holy Land city had its walls demolished in battle about 3,400 years ago. This sounds awfully like the Bible story of the fall of Jericho, and fits snugly in the expected time-frame. At the largest scale, the Big Bang sounds awfully similar, in its suddenness and "out of nothing" character, like the cosmic creation account shared among Muslims, Jews and Christians.

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