Day 20 Devotion – Was the Flood Global?

So He destroyed all living things which were on the face of the ground: both man and cattle, creeping thing and bird of the air. They were destroyed from the earth. Only Noah and those who were with him in the ark remained alive. Genesis 7:23

One of the biggest controversies of the Bible is whether Noah’s Flood is real or myth. The fact that about 180 different cultures, including those in South America, have a flood tradition has convinced many that there was a flood so important that it divided history into before and after. The next question is “Was it global or just local”? This is not an easy question to answer and I personally take the “I don’t know” position but do lean toward the local flood explanation. Here are some arguments for each position.
Global Flood:
1. It makes the most sense from the way the story reads.
2. Noah wouldn’t have needed an ark if it was local; he and the animals could’ve just run to higher ground.
3. The Bible says everything was included.
Local Flood:
1. Geologists say there is no evidence for a flood that covered the whole earth.
2. There is evidence of large flood disasters in the Middle East.
3. Ancient Mesopotamian cultures considered their area to be the whole earth, it was the known world.
In my opinion, the scientific evidence is stronger for the local flood scenario. I do think that rather than fighting over how large it was, let’s focus on the evidence that it did in fact occur. Let’s refer back to the genetic studies I have mentioned in previous devotions. Geneticists say they have encountered something else in their studies of mitochondrial DNA. They have noticed evidence that after the human population began to grow that there was a massive die off and then the population recovered again. DNA evidence shows a population “bottle neck” just like the Bible pictures. So now we have geological, anthropological and genetic evidence confirming the flood did indeed take place and it divided history into before and after.