The Global Flood and Mormon Scripture

hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of mormon stories podcast and a special edition of mormon stories podcast because we are um well into an amazing series dealing with mormon church truth claims uh with mike from ldsdiscussions.com we have covered several topics around the book of mormon and now we have begun an exploration of the bible we've done adam and eve uh today we're going to be covering uh the global flood and mormon scripture next we're going to be covering tower of babel and i just uh cannot say enough good things about the series mike thank you so much no you know what it's been fun and it's kind of fun because i think for me kind of doing them in this the way we're doing it kind of in order um you know it's kind of refreshing my memory a bit from doing these like a year ago on the website and um and so far the feedback's been pretty good i mean i think like i said that the goal is to be able to give information that helps people to explore this stuff and understand it and to do it in a way i think that doesn't make someone who is either a believer or a nuanced believer i think feel like they're being punched in the face repeatedly like you know because sometimes when you read stuff online it just feels like you're just being viciously um torn apart and it's gonna feel like that anyways when you're having these things kind of challenge but at the same time i'm hoping um so far i've had a few people have reached out and said that it's it they appreciate that we're doing it in a way i think that is a little more you know gentler and um you know that's the goal is just because i'm trying to think about this as we do it as if you're presenting it to you know a sunday school class that you know is going to struggle with this stuff in the same way that i did you know when i was going through it yeah yeah as far as i the way i think about this is uh and we'll just repeat this every time because some people are gonna find this on youtube in the middle and they won't have listened to anything before after i'll just say very quickly uh the the you know uh religion is an important part of people many people's lives but people make very important decisions based on the truth claims of their religion and mormonism is no different and people make really important life decisions based on the premise that the mormon church is exactly what it claims to be and is based on a bunch of truth claims and so this this whole episode is about informed consent it's about people um knowing the the facts and the evidence about the mormon church's truth claims we want to do that lovingly and respectfully and then we want to let people make whatever decisions they want to in their life and we are not about tearing down mormonism destroying faith hurting people we just want people to have evidence and facts and then make informed decisions so that's our commitment to you today and the topic that we're covering is uh noah in the ark and uh the global flood and mormon scripture so uh where do you want to begin where do you want to begin mike so we can just uh i guess begin kind of in the same way we did adam just to go over really quickly um most people who are listening are aware of the story um but obviously this is in genesis and there's two kind of flood stories but um the global flood is the famous story in genesis where noah builds an ark um to be saved from the catastrophic flood where all flesh died that moved upon the earth both afoul and of cattle and a beast and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth and every man and so this story is one that we're going to run into a lot of the same issues that we do with adam and eve which is that it's an ideological myth because we can show through a lot of different areas that a global flood did not happen and kind of to what john was saying a second ago you know one of the things about mormonism is that they make very tangible truth claims they make a lot of claims that are testable and whether or not joseph smith intended for them to be tested or thought they ever would be able to be tested as that's another issue um but because of the tangible truth claims that are made with modern revelation and with um the you know modern scriptures at least modern with regards to the fact they live around for 200 years um you know this makes the global flood being a literal event necessary for mormonism and in a lot of ways i think that is where you see a little bit of a fork in the road because a lot of mainstream churches that believe in you know the hebrew bible um can find value in these stories without needing them to be little history and as we're going to see as we go through this mormonism doesn't can't do that because of the fact that just like with adam and eve they cement this in as a literal event yeah and and i just right off the bat man i'm reading the king james version of genesis and i'm just going to reread this all flesh died that moved upon the earth and then it actually it like it gets more specific all birds all cattle and beasts every creeping thing so literally every bug every single insect and bug i'm already thinking really right i mean mosquitoes and i guess mosquitoes don't creep so like ants yeah like everything that would make the soil like worms everything that would make the soil uh you know be fertile for crops every creeping thing died and every human died okay and i don't i don't need to say anything more but that's that's what the bible says i didn't realize it got that specific so yeah i mean i you know he's sharing that yeah you know it's funny because i said before i grew up in a protestant background and i remember um going and having our sunday school class on on the ark and i remember you know you're at this point i'm like uh probably about 12 years old 10 years old somewhere in that range and they're going through and they're they're reading these verses but everyone dies and you know as a kid you know you would think oh you'd be like oh my goodness that's horrible that all the people died my first thought was all the dogs you know because you're a kid but it's just like in my head i'm like that can't be true you couldn't you know you wouldn't have you know in in this i'll keep the shorts it's kind of silly but to your point when you actually think about it you're like that means all the dogs died it means all you know we'll get into this a little more as we go but it means that all of the babies died that you know if you believe god did this he killed babies he killed unborn children and um and as a kid i was so focused on the dogs and because of that i had a really hard time taking it as literally even then because i could not allow myself to believe um that god would kill all the dogs on the planet as you know because i grew up with dogs and that was like you know i still love dogs and um so but to your point it is very very literal um and that's why within mormonism because they build on that literal story and they actually you know expand upon it it's really hard to get away from it and that's why we're going to see as we go that it's just scientifically from all fields of study just you can prove it did not happen yeah just without even getting into the intellectuality of it my my top memory of the global flood is we're reading the story of noah's flood to my daughter maya she's like five yeah and she's like okay so god created all those animals and people right and we're like yeah and god loved all those animals and people right and we're like yeah and then she's like and then god killed them all yeah and she's five i mean that's the thing it's so grim like when you like a lot of times when you when you talk about it in sunday school or in church you talk about the fact that it allows you know um noah to survive and obviously to replenish the earth at the same time when you actually think about it's just so grim and it's also part of what we'll see in the book of mormon which i don't really i don't think any of the overviews talk about just how when you know when jesus dies and is resurrected you see all the cities getting destroyed in the book of mormon and you're just like that's that old testament god that will just you know and it's it's why i think a lot of times we don't like to focus on the old testament so much because when you think about these things they're horrific and um there were many ways not to be too glib about it but it reminds me when i was uh working for microsoft uh the windows microsoft windows would lock up occasionally and you you'd have to do control alt delete you can reboot your computer because your computer would freeze the global flood feels like god's control all delete i mean it basically is i created all this but i didn't do it quite right so i'm just going to have to hit the control delete button and the reason why that's glib is because it's literally killing and murdering women children animals and even bugs yeah they're all kind of innocent but we're we're laboring the point all right yeah we are so um basically you know again we can look at this in a lot of different ways um i talked about this with the adam and eve uh episode um just mentioning you know what david bockwood pointed out that a lot of these stories are based off of babylonian myths which makes sense because scholars believe that these um stories were basically composed or at least composed on the form we have today um during the babylonian exile so that actually makes sense and um so david bacon point out without babel there's no bible and again we'll see that here because the epic gilgamesh which we talked about in the adam and eve story as well is the most famous flood myth um that most scholars would argue noah's story was inspired from um and the old babylonian version was written by 1800 bce as we discussed in the adam and eve episode most scholars would date genesis being composed in the way we have at stage about the sixth or fifth century bce and because it was written in hebrew the earliest it could have been written would have been 1000 bc so even if you want to argue it was being orally told before that um you're still gonna have to contend with the fact that the epic gilgamesh was written long before um the ability to write genesis would have happened about 1000 bce so you've got that time difference there and that's really important so just to be clear when you say no when you or david bocavoice say no babel um without babel there's no bible do you mean tower of babel or do you mean babylon oh they mean like babylonian myths yeah yeah there weren't babylonian myths that predated the bible we wouldn't have a lot of the myths in general yes yes yeah i think david the implication is is that a new group of people meaning the israelites needed some founding stories to begin their scripture and so they just kind of they it's remix they kind of incorporate into their early scripture yeah that they they were passed on from other civilizations to them yeah it would be like you know um i know david bockford said he wasn't the first one that kind of coined that phrase so um i know i know it's apparently a pretty well you know used phrase because of how influential the baloney myths are but one of the ways i've heard it explained is like if you had no ability to write down history and we went through the american revolution and the revolutionary war and all that we couldn't write it down um and then all of a sudden like a hundred years later we could write it down the way it would be written down would be so different than the actual history because you'd be telling these stories over and over again to generations to different communities each community is going to have a different need that you're trying to fulfill with the stories um and so because of that what we would have a hundred years later would be so different than what actually happened and the only reason we have more info on the revolutionary war is because we could write down um information we do have a lot of contemporary records with the babylonian myths these are being told orally um and then obviously with the epic gilgamesh just you know obviously in a form i think they're on tablets or cuneiform tablets something like that so i mean we have something we can reference to so then when you look at genesis which we know now was composed much later and then you see the similarities you can kind of see where they're pulling from and again it's kind of like that whole um i don't know if you consider it anything like pseudopigrapha but it's like you're you're you're you know actualizing as dave aqua you're actualizing these earlier events to give your own community meaning because your community is trying to um have these foundational religious texts that they're going to live by and it's hard sometimes to have those texts when you have all these questions like where do we come from you know how did how did we get here um and these stories are going to answer that got it okay so the epic of gilgamesh i said that's obviously going to be the most important one um i there are so many flood stories around the world um but epica gilgamesh is obviously because of the fact that it's you know a babylonian um myth it's going to be um more important to the community that's going to compose um what will be genesis and so um according to babylonian professor andrew george who wrote a book translating the epica gilgamesh he noted that the flood story in genesis mirrors gilgamesh so closely that few doubt that the account in genesis is derived from gilgamesh um so basically just saying it's it's so close that really it's one of those things like to doubt the similarities and to doubt the connections between the two is to kind of go against the evidence as we talk about the apologetics sometimes you you you have to you know ignore evidence in order to make your conclusion work i mean he's just basically saying at this point they're too close to even you know try to argue that there's no connection all right so that's kind of getting a scholars viewpoint on that yeah and again you know i think i don't know if consensus is such a tricky word with this stuff but i would argue that when you read stuff about ethica gilgamesh to the global flood you're just going to see so many people that will point this out because it's really uncanny and we'll obviously get into that in the next slide all the parallels and i guess there's going to be believing mormons that are like well i don't care what scholars say that's why we have prophets and that's fine this is this episode this series is for people that value evidence yeah well and i would argue this this series is for anyone who really wants to know and again i don't want to get off on a tangent but i think i think i mentioned the first episode but you know the the two questions you have to ask yourself um are if the church wasn't true would you want to know and that a lot of people will say yes but then when you actually start to talk deep down and snow so until that you can be honestly yes then this these episodes aren't for you because you're not going to be in that mindset yeah these episodes i mean these episodes will be here for if that time comes but but until then um it's not and then the second question basically is what would you need to see in order to um acknowledge that the truth claims of mormonism don't add up and that obviously is a question that you have to answer as you do this um but to your point yeah if you're a believing member who is going to say i don't care like if you're a heartland model follower and you're like i don't care what you say about this stuff well that's okay um you know but obviously this is not going to be something that's gonna be helpful but i think for people who are gonna willing to start with a blank slate like you just say and that's what i had to do at one point it's it's really painful it's really hard to get your mind in a mindset where you could say just wipe the site clean i'm starting from you know like i said it in the first episode you're taking the puzzle you're pulling it all apart you're spreading on the table and you're like i'm just going to start with where it goes wherever that might be and then once you get there these episodes will be here for you to try to piece it back together and i'm not saying i'm perfect on this i'm not saying i'm the be all end-all because i'm not but i am saying that hopefully these things can point you in the directions where if you want to learn more about these topics you at least have a a foundation to work from and to go from perfect all right well let's dig into the parallels yeah gilgamesh and the flood story yep so the parallels here like i said they're pretty vast and so in the epic gilgamesh the great gods create a secret plan to flood the world but one of the god's name i don't know if you say e or e or whatever sumerian god enki tells ut nuptim i can't say this right to demolish his house and build a boat to keep both people and animals alive so they're basically saying demolish your house use it to build a boat to keep the people and animals alive the boat is then constructed with six decks divided into seven and nine compartments and the boat was loaded with all of the relatives and craftsmen of the boat along with all of the beasts and animals of the field which will sound familiar to what we just said in genesis the boat is then launched and the storm lasts 60 days and 60 nights a little different than 40. um with the storm pounding intermittently on the seventh day the boat then landed at mount nemus nemus and um the greek sumerian or no uh uh neptushem first releases a dove and then a raven to see if the waters had dried upon the earth then he sent the livestock in different directions to replenish the earth and offered animals and sacrificed to the gods so holy moly yeah i mean it's just it's all right there the dove is there it's got the boat it's got a god commanding it it's got everyone every beasts and animals dying yep like it's even got like i mean it's not 40 days and 40 nights but it's it's close you know multiple nights it lands on a mount yeah like that's that's pretty yeah yeah and that's one of those things too for me when i first started doing the deep dive and i really did not touch bible stuff as much and i i think i was messaging with someone um who had connected with who was kind of in that same boat was just trying to figure it out and i think i had said something about the global flood i'm like yeah you know it makes no sense that you know we couldn't have a global flood yet there in america and he just said if you looked at the epic gilgamesh and i was like i don't know what that is and then you look at it and you're like holy crap like that's exactly what the genesis story is obviously with details changed and and that's a problem again because the dating tells you that it was written before genesis and now an apologetic standpoint would be to say well they both came from the same event so epika gilgamesh and genesis are both retelling the same event with different details because of the fact that they're being written you know maybe long after and i guess that's an argument you can make but the evidence again is going to tell you as we talked about before because of the the fact that these texts were likely composed in the babylonian exile that they're going to be pulling from the babylonian myths they're familiar with and it just gets messy especially when you combine that with what we'll get into in a little bit which is the fact that science tells us this didn't happen yeah all right so why summarize why the episode is important and so we we've mentioned this in some of our other overviews especially about book of mormon kind of influences but of course there are going to be differences between the epic gilgamesh and noah's story but the similarities are too crucial to deny their very core um you know in gilgamesh a man is instructed by a god to build a ship to whether an impending flood to cleanse the earth of all living beings this man seeks to save all of his relatives and animals in both stories the boat line lands on the side of a mountain meaning that the water was so high that it you know that's the only place a boat could land the character sends out a dove and then a raven until they know the water receded enough to let the livestock out then they set make sacrifices um to god for being saved and like i said earlier some apologists will argue these are coming from the same event but like i said you have to combine that with the fact that the timing and the place being a babylonian myth is you know going to influence and the fact that around the world there are other flood stories with similar events this obviously is the closest um and and so when you do that combining with the fact that we can show as we'll get to a science that didn't happen you've just got too many problems to make the argument that you know this did happen but it came from separate events and um again that also is going to be more compounded by mormonism you know cementing this down and expanding on it yeah yeah all right so now we've uh we've we've understood the parallels with the epic of gilgamesh let's move to a science perspective yeah and so just from like a basic scientific perspective there isn't just an overwhelming amount of evidence that makes clear that there was not a global flood that happened at one time that wiped out everything on earth so we're going to highlight some of those areas here just to explain why this is like a consensus if you go to any non-religious scholar um they will not even entertain the idea of a global flood just because there's just too much evidence like there are we can't even go into the details and um you had done an episode a while back with simon sutherton on the global flood that i everyone should check out because he's he goes through this in more detail and obviously he's you know he's got the background in in the the education to explain this without any question um and so the fact is you could you can can show that and so um this is going to be so much of a consensus that even fair mormon concedes that the story of a global deluge then appears to be at complete odds with scientific data so fair mormon will say outright this is a complete odds with the science and we'll get into the apologetics at the end but that's how much of a consensus there is that they're going to say that upfront in their apologetics yeah yeah the science is is overwhelming and i'll put a link to the simon southerton mormon stories episode on the global flood we simon invites a geologist on who is actually lovely he's completely not anti-religion he just says he's been studying the earth forever he actually shows graphical renderings of of what what um regional floods would have looked like to an ancient human and he shows some animations and he talks about what what a a flood might have seemed like to them but he also talks about the impossibility physically geologically of of a global flood so so we'll put a link to that in definitely all right so yeah so we're just going to go into this and again on if you go to ldsdiscussions.com there's a little more than this this is kind of a little bit just to go over the the overview of the overview but the story itself it reads like a mythical story just as adam and eve does because when you think about the logistics of the ark it would be impossible for this time frame this is a ship that is 450 feet long made out of wood um the fact that we're putting it out um what would be you know salt water and i guess you could say the rain water would not be but you'd solve all the salt water that was already there um it just it wouldn't survive a flood without massive reinforcements and none of which were technologically there when noah would have lived and again i get the apologetic there would be to say with god all things are possible but i'm saying from the perspective of how we're doing this we're taking this at face value um and in genesis you've got two creation stories so in one story they take two of every animal in the other story they take two of every animal and then seven of each of the pure species because they're going to set use the other five for sacrifices um it would be impossible given what we know about fossils and um where different animals on the earth came from so you'd have to then argue that somehow noah got kangaroos from australia onto the boat and you know you have bears and penguins and you know all these animals that you've got some that are indigenous to america some to australia some to you know europe and asia and all of those things it would just be impossible and so not only would it be impossible to locate and get them all together but then to fit two of each animal on a ship it's um these are elements of a tall tale or a fable or a mythical story and the moment you start to really think about the logistics you realize immediately this could not happen in the way that the story would portray it i'm sure we're going to get to this but it's like where did they get the food and the water to feed all the animals and bugs how did they store it for all those days what did you do with the excrement for all those animals like and then yeah yeah the boat would have the elephants and the giraffes and the hippos and the lions and them from fighting and yeah and and reinforcing the boat with steel and then and yeah like how did the polar bears land on mount ararat and travel to the north pole without dying how did the kangaroos hop to australia from mount ararat that's the problem and all the marsupials you know and we talked about this in the simon sutherton episode well the koalas there's just like there's like dozens and dozens of marsupials that are only native to australia yep and why why is it that marsupials are native to australia it's because evolution um you know selected for pouch you know you know birthing animals there over hundreds of thousands or millions of years yeah i mean that's just that all that evidence is there how did then the marsupials get on the boat but then migrate back it's just there are a gazillion reasons why scientifically this is possible unless you just say science knows nothing and you're just trying to deny all of science and like i said that and that's one of the when we finally get to the end of this series one of the the late overview topics i did was was kind of looking at that where it's like you flip flip it on its head because sometimes we always think about mormon truth claims are they true or false that's it joseph smith get it right and it's like take a step back and and i i challenge everyone to do this because when you watch these episodes if you're a believer and you're looking at me and you're saying this guy is deceived or misguided whatever the case might be flip it on his head and say if this is correct then what is who got it wrong and if and then say if they got it wrong about that then you have to wipe out everything we know about those fields and so that is a slippery slope and that's why you can't just say you can't give special pleading to this story because you need it to work you have to then expand and say well if i say that this is true that means that all of the consensus we have is false and if that's false everything that comes from those studies is false and it's just it's a never-ending problem and it's one we have to accept and we talk about this in the dna in the book of mormon episodes if you want to say dna doesn't doesn't know the whole story well we're using it for medical advances and scientific advances you can't throw you know to use the phrase you can't throw out the baby with the bath water in this case you're throwing out the bath water to preserve this one belief and it just doesn't it doesn't work um and it just gets messy really quickly and i'm gonna apologize because i kind of uh stole the thunder of this next that's fine and that's just it i mean this is why you know i think you were able to pick up on that so quick because once you start thinking about the details of the story it just falls apart like you would have to fit all these animals on a ship a lot of them are predators and prey you gotta keep them from fighting and killing each other there's no way noah could care for all of them if they got you know i'm sick or scared or they need a specific food i mean different animals need different food the amount of food needed to feed them would be problematic because you've got to have that weight on the boat to last that long the kinds of food is a problem the amount of water you would need because again the flood even if you want to say rain water is pure it's mixing with the salt water underneath there's no way to do that you have to figure out how these animals keep a proper exercise sanitation um some animals need cold weather some need warm weather and again we're you know the point of going through this isn't to like just make fun of it it's just to say like you need all of these details to line up and these are being written from a perspective that i think a lot of scholars actually would argue that when this was written this was not meant to be taken as little history it wasn't until you know we get into you know not even before joseph smith a little bit but until you get into that era where all of a sudden these things start turning literal as opposed to more metaphorical and that is another fingerprint that tells you again as you go through mormonism in the scriptures of it that it's coming from an era where the stuff's being taken literal whereas if you'd gone maybe 400 years earlier they probably wouldn't have wouldn't have expanded on the story because of the fact that they could have accepted the fact that it's not a true literal history yeah also i'm just going to say what comes to my mind is if if god is powerful enough to make a magic boat and to manage all these animals so that they can survive and not kill each other and be fed and live and survive and then once they get off the ark all make their ways to the right places and replicate if god has the magic power to do all that why didn't god have the magic power to not make a flood necessary to begin with and to not have to kill all the men women and children and animals in the first place if you're gonna go to the magic god magic god should have thought this through better well i mean and that's the thing it's like again you have that excuse me have that like you know like you're again we don't i don't want to be a dead horse here but one of the things that that's frustrating about this story to me is it makes in my opinion god seemed like a pretty horrible person and i know how offensive that is and so please let me explain because we're told every life is precious and i fully believe that but in this particular example in the story if you want to believe in his little history you have to believe that god could not have just taken out the people that were wicked and causing problems but instead took out all the women the children the babies the unborn babies the innocent animals and it's just i'm thankful it's a mythical story because if it wasn't if it was somehow literally history it would make me very angry to think that that would happen and i want to go off on a tangent because that's kind of outside of the realm of what we're talking about with mormonism but yeah i mean to your point you would think that there could be some sort of a targeted um way to take out the people that were so wicked that he wanted to start over as opposed to just out like you said kind of outright rebooting the world and um but again they've got a special power there must have been a better way yeah i mean that's just it and yeah and again i'm trying not to get in too many tangents here but that's oh that's no i'm just i'm summarizing no no i know it's just it's one of those inconsistencies because you'll hear um and i'll keep this short when they had the november 15 policy with the church right and they talked about it after you know it came out and it was highly controversial and a camera who said i don't know if it was russell nelson i think it might have been and he talks about how they went through every permutation of what could have happened and god gave them the revelation of the november 15 policy that after st thinking about every permutation of what could happen from that policy god revealed him the way to do it which was the november 15 policy and it's one of those things where it's like we're told god thinks through all these things and this is the best that that could happen and and you go no because you know in this particular case you i you know we'll get into it but the estimates i think are between like 10 and 30 million people on the earth to kill that many people just to take care of the few wicked just it doesn't make sense yeah it doesn't make sense so anyways and the mormon church's top apologetic arm agrees with us that it doesn't make sense and then the science and it's always fun when fair mormon or the mormon church's top apologists agree with science yeah and that's the thing i mean and we talked about this in the dna episode but you have to have a pretty clear consensus i think for apologetics to be willing to make that space because of course you're going to fight it until you can't and so um like we said if you know fair admits that that the science is clear and so these are just some more things beyond the animal so if there was a global flood how do you explain the relative ages of mountains um why weren't the sierra nevadas eroded as much as the appalachians during the flood why is no evidence of flood in the ice core ice cores from greenland have been dated all the way back to forty thousand years by counting the annual layers a worldwide flood would have expected to disrupt that and there's no disruption in the in the sediments in the ground um and the sediments kind of form the same way where it's like you know year after year after year layer after layer um so you got the how are the polar ice caps even possible because if you had such a massive water as the flood which would have been like four thousand years ago um that would have been enough water basically to either break the polar caps off or just melt them up altogether why did the flood not leave any traces on the sea floors you know a year-long flood because it's 40 days and 40 nights but the water doesn't recede for a long time you would see the footprints of that in the sea bottom cores why is there no evidence of a flood and tree ring dating the tree rings go all the way back to somewhat ten thousand years no evidence of any disruption during this time and so it's kind of like we were talking about with the dna in the book of mormon episode um there are so many instances where you're like well you would see a disruption if there was going to be one and here we just there's no disruption in in fact the evidence is all telling us that everything was ok everything just kind of continued on um obviously there's some local issues here and there but that that's that's way different than a global flood you're saying all of these points come from fair mormon's website that you pulled on this slide no no no no i'm saying that because fair mormon is admitting the science is not clear and i'm saying so because fair mormon is admitting to science clear here's here's why the science is not clear so this is not from fair warning this is from a an article that's kind of going through all of the all of the reasons that just make it impossible yeah and we again we dive into this also on the side simon sotherton global flood episode okay great so uh next question how did civilization survive the flood yep and this is gonna be something we'll see in the next episode with the tower of babel as well because again you would have disruptions if these events are literal and so there are a number of civilizations that were here before the flood and none of them were wiped out by the flood or appear to have been interrupted in any meaningful way so we have the sumerians that they date between 4 500 and 2000 bce uh the egyptian old kingdom which they date is starting between 26 86 and 21 81 bc with the great pyramid built at 2560. um you've got the minoans on uh crete i'm not sure if they say no one's right 2600 to 1100 um you've got norte chico in peru 3 500 to 1800 bc so all of these are four civilizations that we have um enough records to say they were established before the global flood if there was a global flood you would expect to see obviously this these civilizations wiped out with their rema with their remnants behind tell me again the date we estimate the global flood needed to be it would be like uh 20 20 400 bce somewhere in there 2200 i think 400. somewhere around there i might have these are civilizations that we have evidence that they predated that they predated it and that they had continuity through it yes and existed afterwards yeah and that's all even if even if you believe that these civilizations got wiped you didn't exist until after the flood there's no way they could have developed to the advanced level that they did with their own languages with their own sophisticated technological developments there's no way they could have developed that fast even if they started right after the flood correct well yeah and if you think about it from the perspective of the way say the book of mormon comes up with it with with the way these stories branch out or even in the bible just say for example the global flood wiped out all these all these civilizations and so obviously you know the eight people in the ark start repopulating and they spread out those people would be carrying those traditions and so you would see those traditions in egypt you see those traditions all these areas because they're all leaving with one language all of those things and so that's where you just again when we talk about compounding problems it's just it compounds and compounds and compounds because we have evidence saying it didn't happen and even if you want to argue it did from like a scriptural standpoint then those are the questions you have to answer like well why don't they you know it's kind of like why don't the book of mormon people have jewish traditions in the book of mormon if they truly came from you know from jerusalem and and those things would pop up here where it's like well if that were the case you'd have writings on cave walls um reflecting the story because they would have lived through it or their parents whatever their grandparents we'd have none of that yeah the evidence is that these that these uh separate civilizations developed independently yeah and over a very very long period of time that predates the flood and that has continuity after the flood right yeah so basically again you you would expect disruption obviously you'd expect obliteration um but you have none of that and so like again in the pyramids there's inscriptions there's no reference to any type of global flood um you know and again if global flood occurred how did animals become spread out so quickly you know in and there are some you know young earth creationists who will make up i shouldn't say make up but who have theories like an angel took angels flew them around the world and i'm not trying to make fun i'm just saying like at some point that's where you get to it it's because there's nowhere else to go and so you just there's too much evidence against it there's too many civilizations there's so many animals it the the migration pet all that he's just there's no way and that's why fairway would admit that the science is is pretty overwhelming against the idea yeah and if god's gonna fly people around with angels why did he need to make a boat in the first place he could have just right lifted everybody up flooded the earth drained it lifted everybody back down if you're gonna be flying people around with special angels you didn't even need the boat yeah i mean that's the thing it's like you're trying to um and again i'm trying to compare this to mormonism it's the same thing it's like well why well have the plates if joseph's just gonna be given given in a rock and a hat these things don't add up when you start pulling pulling the layers back and um yeah in this case i think it was supposed to be mythical any or more you know figurative so i think that's it's just it's the problem of more modern times to to to you know kind of impose a literal uh view on it and that leads to problems and so this will take us um kind of into mormonism and yeah um you know the book of mormon requires a global flood if you want to believe it's an ancient historical text there's just no way around it um the book of mormon declares there was a global flood um in ether six the flood is addressed from the jaredite plates which would have been created shortly after the flood around the time of the tower of babel and it says for behold they rejected all the words of ether for he truly loved or truly told them of all things from the beginning of man and that after the waters had receded from the off the face of this land it will become a choice land above all other lands a chosen land of the lord wherefore the lord would have that all men should serve him who dwell upon the face thereof and then and that it was the place of the new jerusalem which should come down out of heaven and the holy sanctuary of the lord so this is basically telling us that there was a global flood that effectively was used by god to preserve america for the book of mormon people and this just it eliminates the apologetics of a local flood because now you need a massive local flood at the same time both in america and the old world in order to make these two stories mesh and obviously we just don't have that yeah and that's the thing is that um and we'll talk about this more more modern-day mormon apologists are going to want to do what other protestant christian sects have done which is to say oh it's just a myth that was never meant to be taken seriously but that's the problem with joseph smith over and over and over again he makes everything literal and he makes everything material and he writes it into all the different forms of scripture he sort of infects the book of abraham book of moses book of mormon doctrine and covenants with all the literality including doctrine and covenants saying six thousand it was six thousand year earth or whatever like joseph smith was all about the literality and and so he it's it's he paints himself into a corner overnight yeah i mean that's just that he wanted to have answers for everything and by doing so that was his power that was easy yeah that's the charisma is being able to have these answers to the questions people had and unfortunately one of the problems is you keep building on it and you know as we go through this it could you know the book of mormon obviously is the big one but it gets worse and so um you know it's just it this is why you like you said you can't get away from it and so garden of eden in missouri is the best yes so we talked about this in our last episode so joseph smith after the book of mormon is written is going to proclaim that adam and eve lived in adam on diamond which is in missouri which is the place where they were lived after being expelled from the garden um he proclaimed that this is where they live so basically he's saying adam and eve lived in missouri but this problem is going to continue because that means that noah's story is going to begin in america and that means that a global flood is necessary because you got to go you got to bring noah from missouri to the old world and again without a global flood noah cannot get from missouri to the old world and without a global flood the americas would not be preserved for the jaredites um following their destruction the or and following the destruction that the gerais lehigh so effectively you need because some apologists will say well look it could have been a local flood where noah took the mississippi river then kind of connected out to the ocean went to the old world but that just doesn't answer because you still need everyone to die in the americas to preserve it based on what the book of mormon and what prophets have told us so this is just again i keep talking about layers this is like layer upon layer upon layer of problems and so every time you answer one you're still going to have a bunch underneath and this is joseph smith just cementing into the ground that a global flood was literal yeah and i mentioned before that that that gets one of the biggest laughs in the entire book of mormon musical it's just as like you know that that the guard of eden was in jackson county missouri yeah mocking but right it gets those laughs not because people want to be mean right because it's just so kind of ridiculous yeah i mean i don't talk about mormonism a whole lot to people that aren't mormon and i've only done it to a few people and that's one of those ones where you tell them that and they they will like they'll have that reaction either like kind of like like kind of like that blurting out laughing or just kind of like the gas because it's like wait what you like it's so completely nonsensical to a 2022 understanding of the world that when you say that the immediate reaction is like there's no way people believe that and it's like they do and you know again i would argue again as i i was a convert that is the stuff that was never told to me until after i was in the church for a while and even then that is not this you do not hear very often in modern times like last i don't know a couple decades you're not going to hear in church much at all that adam and eve lived in missouri i'm trying to think i obviously i haven't been active you know i'm still a member but i haven't acted for years but i just don't remember that being mentioned in sunday school classes and if it is it's quick you know don't mention adam on diamond and just move because the more you think about it the more it falls apart and i'm thinking and you know we'll get to the kinderhook episode yeah and we'll talk about zelf but what what what joseph seems to show oh so book of abraham kinder hook plates and zelf these are all examples where joseph is like oh look mummies and papyrus and then in his mind it's like oh i associate abraham with egypt and so like this is the book of abraham even though we know it's not or the kinderhook plates somebody literally makes fake plates to fool joseph they give them to joseph and immediately joseph declares the origin of the plates and starts the process of translating them even though they were fake to begin with or joseph walks and finds some bones and it's he's like that's zelf the white lamanite you know what i mean he's got this he's got this penchant and part of his power is built on being able to just immediately know what things are and tell everybody their history that's like his brand that's like his superpower he's a seer and it always works like you've told us so many times mike it always works when nobody can disprove what you said exactly as long as there's no archaeology egyptology anthropology geology genetics as long as there's nothing to disprove it um he's fine so when joseph says oh emma don't worry the golden plates are safe you know and he's looking into a seer stone as long as no one can disprove that they're he's fine but as soon as lucy you know lucy harris has got the 116 page manuscript all of a sudden joseph can't use the stone and he can't find them anymore yep he's he's very knowledgeable and again i'm even thinking of the book of mormon prophecies we talked about um how he's really good about prophesying about things that he know happened in the past in the book of mormon but all of a sudden the prophecies stop there's no prophecies about anything that happened past 1829 in the book of mormon and that's just this this is just joseph's pattern again and again and again he's like oh i'm walking around missouri look the garden of eden there's some stones he's thinking about adam and eve and an altar or or whatever and he's like boom garden of eden right here where we're walking right yeah no that's it i mean that's just it you know it's the whole it's it's good i don't mean to like take us off on a side track mike everything you've been teaching me is starting to crystallize patterns in my mind and that's why i i bring that out no and it's true and that's you know in the first episode i talked about that like you're gonna see these patterns and that's why i wanted to do them in a way that's kind of like maybe not perfectly chronological but it it takes you through a linear thread of this stuff because once you see the patterns then you can start to understand how he did it and what he was pulling from and you know i think um when you talk about some of the the other things like kinder hook plates that is what happens when you build your brand uh you know he's a confidence man i i know that has a derogatory term to some because it sounds like a con man or because it kind of is a comment but the whole thing is he needs people to have confidence in him so when people have questions um he has to give them or else people are going to start saying kind of like you see in today's church where people are saying why can't they get answers on heavenly mother lgbt people all that because you need to have answers in order to keep people um believing that you are the only person who can answer them and um but the problem is when you give all those answers you're also giving tangible testable claims and for joseph a lot of those were testable after he he died but um the fact is we can we can look at a lot of them now today and test them and if in when you see them start to pile up over and over again that they don't withstand the evidence that that's a that's a problem that has to be addressed and you can't just brush them away as saying that the science is wrong or that we're misinterpreting it or that maybe joseph meant something else because we have to take it at face value because that's all we can do is take it the way he said it and there's a perfect segue to that unfortunately it doesn't stop with joseph because this slide says all mormon prophets from joseph smith to russell and nelson today have all proclaimed a global flood yeah and so this is going to be um there's more quotes on the website i just picked three just because honestly we you know we could read them all day but um prophet joseph f smith said uh the flood was baptism of the earth now a word as to the reason for the flood it was the baptism of the earth and that had to be by immersion if the water did not cover the entire earth then it was not baptized for the baptized baptism of the lord is not pouring or sprinkling and that's again injecting mormonism into that you know joseph smith throwing down throwing down there's no there's no there's no you know confusion there and then jeffrey r holland more recently i have to say joseph fielding smith his son wrote those books dog um okay so it says joseph f smith but those doctrines of salvation books were weren't they written by joseph fielding smith you know so joseph f smith was his dad and then joseph fielding smith and i've read all all three doctrines of salvation volumes one two three i read them on my mission and it's just all there literal flood six thousand year earth so it's not just joseph father it's joseph fielding as well okay i may have screwed that up too and i was putting there that's fine and then jeffrey r holland a little bit more recently in 1976 um said such a special place america needed now to be kept apart from other regions free from the indiscriminate traveler as well as the soldier of fortune to guarantee such sanctity the very surface of the earth was rent in response to god's decree the great continents separated and the ocean rushed in to surround them the promised place was set apart without habitation it waited for the fulfillment of god's special purposes and then bruce r mcconkie the garden of eden does that have to do with flood yeah he's basically just saying that they had to basically get rid of everything on the earth in order to preserve america for the book of mormon people and so he's saying that they set the promised land apart by basically flooding it and getting everything off of the off of the land here and that the america then waited for the fulfillment which would be the book of mormon i mean i don't mean to be rude here i've i've met twice i've had lunch with elder holland and i talked to him about evolution and he told me personally he believed in evolution but that evolution didn't contradict the plan of salvation that you could believe in both right on the one hand i'm i'm not surprised that he's okay with a global flood but the fact that he went to yale university to get a phd um it's just kind of mind-blowing just like russell nelson's a medical doctor and he doesn't believe in evolution yeah contradicts elder holland by the way i i just have to say it is a little bit weird to have a super-educated guy still believing in a global flood it's so anyway that's just my observation no it's true and and um bruce r mcconkey who um has obviously more uh you know direct uh beliefs um the garden of eden was in missouri noah was taken to the old world by the flood this teaching was given by joseph smith and is still accepted as true doctrine given this teaching mormons have to accept the global flood as a global phenomenon phenomenon and he's right he's right and that's the thing like the problem is you could look at that and go well he's a different time bruce mcconkie said a lot of things that obviously have caused a lot of harm for people but he is right in this instant that the scriptures that joseph smith gave us whether you believe he authored them or not is telling us not just in the book of mormon but the book of abraham also needs a global foot all these things need global floods and so you cannot tell me that you can believe in a local flood and still maintain historicity of the scriptures of mormonism it you cannot you just can't do it they're too interwoven with literal stories from genesis and this one is really important because of the fact that it ties into the reason that the americas were left empty which again we covered a lot in the dna episode because now we're told there were a lot of people there but the point is nobody believed that until all of these scientific studies started getting to the point where you could not avoid you know these implications yeah and uh and so progressive mormons nowadays are gonna say well prophet seers and revelators get it wrong sometimes yeah well if that's true if like all of them from then until now have gotten it wrong including the current ones yeah if mormons are going to be consistent they have to say well did we get the race thing wrong which now the church is admitting they did well did they get the lgbtq thing wrong which they kind of are now waffling about and they get the woman thing wrong and then at that point it's like the slippery slope will you ask what's the value of a prophet syrian revelator if they literally get so many crucial things wrong okay so let's go on to the church still teaching from its website in the gospel topics essays about the necessity of a global flood yeah so now they don't have a full essay on it but they have a gospel topics entry on noah and the church states when the people rejected his message god commanded noah to build an ark gather animals and prepare for a flood noah and his sons shem ham and japheth and their wives were the only people on the whole earth saved from the flood um and then the book of abraham itself um requires the same thing and so a book abraham says as it was with noah so shall it be with thee but through my thy ministry my name shall be known in the earth forever for i am thy god when this woman discovered the land it was under water who afterwards settled her sons in it and thus from ham sprang the race which preserved the curse in the land so the book of abraham is telling us that egypt was discovered while it was still underwater which would be you know the residual of the flood and this obviously leads into the whole curse of ham which leads into the the racism that comes from the book abraham we'll get into that down the road but um just pointing out that you have to have a global flood for both the book of mormon and the book of abraham and joseph smith produced both of those years apart too so i mean you know again you would there would be you know that would give him a chance if you're talking about getting it right you know and we see the exact same thing because joseph smith believed just as so many in his day did that the bible was a history book and so he's trying to write these these scriptures so that people around him believe and people around him including himself believe them to be literal history so of course he's going to carry on that tradition it's just unfortunate for him that that's just not what happened yeah okay and so if we're doing the body count uh the bible's a problem the book of mormon's a problem uh joseph smith's a problem every prophet from joseph to the current one is a problem the book of abraham is a problem as it relates to the flood and it gets worse because the book of moses is yeah that's the next slide yep so now we're going to get to the book of moses which is the same problem remember the book of moses is obviously expanding off of genesis but it's part of joseph's mistranslation of the bible which depending on uh which leaders you read um you know is either an inspired translation or given through pure revelation but this would have given him a chance to clarify the historicity of the flood but instead he doubles down he says and it came to pass that noah continued his preaching unto his people saying hearken give heed unto my words believe and repent of your sins and be baptized in the name of jesus christ the son of god even as our fathers and ye shall receive the holy ghost that ye may have all things manifest and if ye do not this the floods will come in upon you and god said unto noah this is a few verses down and god said unto noah the end of all flesh is come before me for the earth is filled with violence and behold i will destroy all flesh from off the earth and so basically not only do you need a global flood but this ties back into some of the things talk about the book of mormon because joseph smith i was writing um being baptized into in the name of jesus christ thousands of years before jesus was like literally known to anyone and so these are the problems you get when you see you can tell joseph smith is rewriting genesis from a 19th century christian perspective because he's literally doubling down on a global flood and then he's also throwing in there uh being baptized in the name of jesus christ when nobody in that time nobody would have known who jesus was that that is just absolutely you know from a scholarly perspective no chance and so to do this requires you to can basically disconnect from evidence in in in logic and say that god gave this is a revelation um to moses and moses gave this as a revelation to you know or to know and all that and um the problem with that is that joseph smith is going to double down now and you would then have to say well then everyone in the bible got it wrong but that they didn't you know i mean and this is where you start getting twisted up when you try to make it work yeah and if god really wants people to believe and not to lose their faith if that's like the whole purpose of the plan of salvation man if god's going to take the time to reveal new scripture to joseph whether it be the book of mormon doctrine and covenants book of moses or book of abraham why couldn't god have slid in there hey y'all yeah you know how the bible had a lot of you know mistakes because of it being changed over time just so you know that whole flood thing not literal don't don't lose your faith over it it's just a nice smith or a fable but that's not what's happening it's not in the literality and the thing is again you know you could you can make the argument that because the the flood was known to these people um you know even if they even if the ancient people believed it more in a figurative sense that joseph smith wouldn't then write gen rewrite genesis and say this didn't really happen but or you know maybe he could have said you know i revealed unto moses this story and it wasn't literal um but at the same time um it provides value or he could have even just left it as is but the fact is he expands on it he doubles down on it and that's where he where it gets to the point where it's really hard to excuse it as just him preserving a tradition and so all right so let's uh let's now look at a little bit more in depth the mormon apologetic response to the global flood yeah so this is fair mormon and this is from their entry on the global flood they say the church does not require a belief in a global flood despite byu professor donald w perry's article in the enzyme what the church teaches is that noah was a real prophet and that he was commanded to save his family along with a number of animals in an ark from a flood which covered his world and again this sounds great to say to a believing member who's struggling to maintain their faith but the problem is if you don't believe in a global flood you do not believe in a historical book of mormon book of abraham book of moses or even you know a historical bible to that point and so this just it from an apologetic standpoint it just doesn't really feel um intellectually consistent with what they're still telling you to to maintain belief in can i just can i just note a problem here yeah okay so you just share a quote from fair mormon saying the church does not require a belief in a global flood you might if i just back up to a slide you just have bruce r mcconkey uh mormons have to accept the flood as a global phenomenon okay so help me out mike who are we supposed to believe here do we believe bruce r mcconkey ordained as a prophet seer and revelator um saying that mormons have to accept the flood as a global phenomenon or and the scriptures or do we believe fair mormon they have no authority they are not ordained as prophets and revelators that they'll tell you a gazillion times that what they have to say is not even official church doctrine they'll do their best to distance themselves from the church and discredit themselves by saying they're not official which does not acknowledge them as official spokespeople and yet somehow we're supposed to give any care that they're telling us what we do and don't have to believe in i don't get that can you help me no i mean i said this i think in a previous episode but in a lot of ways they're like the car salesman who's basically in their head trying to do anything they can do to keep you from walking out the door and um in this case what they're telling you is they're telling you something that they know is gonna make somebody who's struggling with feel better but at the same time what they're not telling you is all of the underlying things the underlying implications that not believing in a global flood has within mormonism and again i've said this with the adam and eve story these problems are not that big of a problem for any other religion that is either mainstream christian or you know jewish people because they can take these stories as mythical take the values and walk from and use those and and leave the the rest behind but because joseph smith doubles down and because he makes truth claim based off them because the church is so um requires so much of us that i feel like that it matters you know if you make tangible claims and they are proven false um then that's a problem and you know the thing is you asked earlier why do we have profits if they keep getting it wrong and the better way to look at it is um if someone gave you a calculator and you use that calculator for your your home budget or business decisions and you knew that that calculator was going to get it wrong two percent of the time you know would you ever use that calculator and the answer is of course not because if it's getting around two percent of the time it may end up costing you a lot of money or maybe it'll you know end up causing problems with whatever you're trying to calculate for work or home these profits are not getting at right 90 percent of the time you know and so the problem is what you're going to get what if you're doing medical calculations exactly if you're doing uh architectural structural calculations for like pieces of a building or skyscraper that are all going to fit together you're going to use a calculator that's going to be wrong you know that that much yeah and that's the problem so we're you know again we're not talking about two percent of the time being wrong we're talking about i mean it's hard to put a percentage on without getting hit with speculation but you get the point without being insulting right well it's not i mean i mean i was being serious because i'm like in my head i'm like would you say 50 but i wouldn't even argue that it would be that high because we can show on all of these claims that they have problems and so that's just the point it's like would you if you if you wouldn't trust a calculator um that you know is gonna be wrong just say five percent of time would you trust profits who are deciding um how you spend your money um how what you eat and drink what underwear you're wearing um where you're gonna spend your free time yeah i love you yeah who who you're going to you know use your political clout to stop from having equality and again i'm we don't get into tangible i'm just saying if a calculator is wrong five percent you're not going to use it so if prophets of the church keep getting it wrong to the point where all the apologetics today are basically telling you to ignore the old prophets what is that telling us as far as the reliability of today's prophets why should we possibly think today's prophets are going to be any more correct when we can already show russell nelson has gotten it wrong on a lot of issues by himself so yeah it's a problem it's who you marry when you marry yeah oh how soon you have kids how many kids you have whether or not you pursue an education whether you have a career how you dedicate your whole life it's just really great um or or significant i also just want to note that this is another common and disingenuous tactic of of mormon apologists because they'll tell you something like you don't have to believe in a global flood with no authority okay it won't add to that the implications that some yeah that's just it they don't go okay well now that now that we've given you permission without any prophetic authority yeah that you don't believe in a global flood let us take you through all the ways that you can still believe the book of mormon abraham moses and doctrine and covenants and prophetic authority will now spend time helping you understand why you should care about these scriptures and these prophets even though they're wrong they don't they don't get into that they want you inspecting the bark of the tree without ever step stepping back to look at the forest and that's what it is let's not let's not drill into that yeah just wanted to kind of give that um reflection so fair concludes what we can accept about the flood and what is yeah so what they're saying basically is that you don't have to believe in a literal global flood but here are the things that we can accept regardless of whether or not it's global or local and so they're saying there existed a prophet named noah noah was commanded by the lord to construct an ark noah wanted warned the people of the impending deluge noah his family and the animals he collected were saved from it the lord made a covenant with noah and his descendants and so this is one of those things and this is where i get really north apologetics because what they'll say is we can't know everything so let's throw away all the things we do know just in the hopes of what we don't know and this is a problem because what they're telling us to do is to say you can throw away the idea that it's a global flood which is the whole cornerstone of the story and they're saying you can do that as long as you believe the details that come from that bigger story and to me that's just not intellectually honest because they're saying that you can accept this as belief and these are things that we can't possibly know or not know and then throughout all the things that we know didn't happen and it just doesn't that's not how history works it's not how it's not how anybody else in uh apologetics of mormonism would approach claims from you know catholics or muslims or jehovah's witnesses or scientology and so if you can't apply the same critical thinking to your own church that you would apply to others that's a red flag that there's problems and this is an area where we're just fair is spending so much time on saying here's what you can accept even though these are the only things we can't prove or disprove um oh and by the way we're not going to get into the fact that this is how important this is because of what joseph smith does with regards to like joseph putting adam and eve in missouri as well because that has implications that go into the story as well that they're kind of going to skirt by yeah and this is again the apologetic tactic they want to shrink the target they want to shrink it it's like it's like the book of mormon geography yeah everyone knew it was tip to tip you know alaska down to the tip of south america everyone knew that joseph smith all the prophets and revelators from then until now the book of mormon itself we covered that in the book of mormon and yet now what apologists want to do is they want to put a tiny little group in central america that was surrounded by other people because as we covered in the dna episode uh genetics just dna alone just overwhelmingly invalidates the book of mormon yeah so they want to shrink into this little tiny little population that immediately got overwhelmed because they they know there's no evidence for their claim and you just it's so brilliant mike what you highlight here is by saying that you you can still believe in noah how do you prove noah didn't exist you still have to believe that god talked to noah how could anyone disprove that god talked to noah all of these bullets it's just brilliant what you're saying they're all things that are disprovable and then everything about the surrounding story that that again is validated and verified by all the mormon scriptures and prophets yeah uh we're gonna just say these are not the droids you're looking for and expect you not to think through how this story alone of the global flood literally sinks the bible the book of mormon the doctrine covenants the book of abraham the pearl of great price and all the prophets in their authority from then until now yeah and again we could we could go on with examples like all day long but it'd be like you know if you're a sports fan and i was like you know what i was in um i was in new york and i walked into a room and there were all the greats there was you know tom brady and peyton manning joe montana steve young and i had dinner with them i played football with them and then all of a sudden someone says um i looked at your schedule you weren't in new york that week you were actually at home working the entire week and i was like well just because i wasn't there didn't mean you can't believe that i played with them you know i mean it's like once you take the the part once you take the part you can disprove and throw that away you can't then just say all these other elements can withstand because they can't and that's that's the problem you cannot say well maybe it didn't happen and the whole thing didn't happen like the bible says it was but you can still believe the elements that we can't disprove and it's like you can't do that and then be intellectually consistent with how we would approach any other religion or any other claim from you know from you know scientific or non-scientific perspective it just it doesn't work that way and then you're giving special pleading to your case which just doesn't work because of the fact that it's so cemented in as little history within mormonism again this is an argument you can make a little better if you did not double down and triple down it's just you can't do it yeah yeah so you this slide your this next slide you're basically saying fair wants us to have our cake and eat it too right yeah and so this is from fair and so they say as demonstrated by doctrine and covenants a belief that this flood was global in nature is not a requirement for latter-day saints we are encouraged to study and teach each other science traditionally many earlier members and leaders endorse the global flood views common in society and christendom generally the accumulation of additional scientific information have led some to rethink their views as to the nature of the flood some still believe in a global flood some believe in multiple floods happening over time some believe in a local flood one localized to the immediate surroundings of noah is the best explanation of the evidence some believe there was no flood at all people of different views can be members in good standing and i just the thing is you're you're telling people that um you could be a member in good standing if you if you don't believe it but then they're also telling you that you should be sharing science with each other i would i would welcome anyone who's a member who is a teacher on sunday to go in and start teaching science to your class about the science of the book of mormon or this and see how long you're a member in good standing for because this is simply not true you can be a member in good standing as long as you keep these thoughts yourself but to say that we are encouraged um to study and teach each other science is simply not true and it again is skirting the fact that um they are ignoring a lot of the implications that come from telling people you can do this i want to address this have your cake and eat it too but since you've already talked about the good stamping let's go and do the next slide and then we'll come back to that yeah and so um going beyond what i just said this is not about whether or not you could be in a good state it's not about whether a member can be in good standing it's about whether or not the church's truth claims hold up to the evidence like i don't care if i could be a member in good standing if the church is not what it claims to be if the church's truth claims are false me being a member in good standing means nothing to me and so um this apologetic is basically seeking to assure people who are coming to terms with the fact that the flood could not be global they're trying to assure them you can you could be welcome at church but it's not actually answering all of the things we've already talked about in this episode that mormonism you know again cements into the ground as a literal story that is unmovable because of the fact that it's its doctrine and so um fair gives this quote they say the story of a global deluge then appears to be at complete odds with scientific data which may encourage some members not only to doubt the scriptures but to even question the existence of god therefore can one create better assumptions about the nature of the flood of noah and yet still accept what is taught in church and this is where i get annoyed because they're telling members don't throw out the baby with the bathwater but what i said earlier is true which is every other religion can do what they're saying other religions can absolutely um understand that this is not historical but still believe in god and and so the mormon church here is saying we own the concept of god so if you walk away you can't do that but what i would argue is you can walk away from mormonism and join another christian church or become a jewish or any other church that believes in the hebrew bible and still maintain a faith in god god does not need mormonism mormonism mormonism needs god and so fair here is tying god to mormonism and i find that to be such a manipulative tactic because they know full well that you can believe in god without believing in the book of mormon in the book of abraham and yet they don't even give you that as is as part of the equation the equation is you either stay here and believe in god or you walk away and lose everything and i hate that equation because it's simply it's just dishonest yeah it really is a bait and switch and here's what i mean by that and i and i i talked about this last night in the episode about the book of abraham um joseph the whole value proposition of the of the founding of the mormon church was that joseph had special powers as we learned in our treasure digging episode what joseph learned from his folk magic treasure digging was that he could get people to believe he had special powers right when he didn't have special powers and even after the treasure wasn't found he could get them to still believe that is the thing the value proposition that that carries into the book of mormon into the founding of the church into him into the doctrine of covenants declaring him as a prophet sarah revelator and translator and then from there on everyone's like wow what's joseph going to come up with next wow joseph the heavens are open again god's talking to joseph and so it's almost like the fur it's almost like a house where the first level of the house is that god spoke to joseph joseph had special powers and then all the prophets from then to now have special powers as well so that's level one of the house and then you build the second layer of the house which is like all the ward buildings in the community and and the way of life and the mormon people and the missions and the temples let's just say that's all the second layer it's the community it's just all the things that we love and what apologists want to do is they want to say okay well if you want to you can remove it turns out that the entire first level is fraudulent and corrupt and is architecturally unsound and we acknowledge that and what they want to be able to do is give you the option of saying you could just remove that whole first level if you wanted to but but you know we believe that the the second layer of the house the second floor of the house should still remain intact and so just live on the second floor of the house even if we know we have to tear down the first level and we all know what happens logically when you when you tear down and remove the first level of a house right yeah the the rest of the house comes down crumbling but fair wants you to say well don't think about that first level being rotted and corrupt and and being destroyed just continue living in the second level um but but that's again then it brings for me the wise man build his house upon the rock song do you want to build your life living on that second floor knowing that that first floor is crumbling has crumbled or is going to crumble any minute and the church saying well forget the fact that the story of the global flood invalidates literally everything about mormonism you can still be a member of good standing and enjoy the fruits of mormonism it's it's a bait and switch that's disingenuous and that ignores the it's it's almost insulting to the intelligence of modern members that they're like all this stuff is clearly not true but but these are not the droids you're looking for keep paying your tithing keep going to the temple keep obeying the current profits even though all that other stuff is obviously wrong right well i mean it's yeah like i said i just i hate the approach because for me again and this is my perspective as being a convert but when i left um be when i stopped being an active member of the church like i'm still an active i'm still a member just not active and when i stopped going i immediately fell back onto the beliefs i had you know from that protestant background and because that was comfortable to me and um and i still found a lot of value in that and obviously going through looking at the bible stories which i i truly find to be just the most fascinating things because i've learned so much from like david bakavoy's episodes with you um bart ehrman um even dan mcclellan on tick tock who i think does a great job with it um as far as looking at just from like the the scholarly consensus when you listen to them i find it to just be so amazing to understand why they were written in the perspective they were written what the needs of the community were but the point is when you leave mormonism you can still fall back on another church that believes in the hebrew bible and still maintain a belief in god because um you do not you know again the whole concept of god in the bible does not need mormonism at all but mormonism makes this value proposition that they're tied together and if you walk away you lose both and and that's where i get frustrated because the honest answer would be to say hey if you don't believe in a global flood then all of a sudden we're going to have to admit the book of mormon is not historical if that is a problem for you and you still want to maintain a belief in god you might want to look at another church but instead they're saying if that's a problem for you and you can't get over it don't throw the baby out the bath water and i just that that that's frustrating because they're tying them together when they're the ones tying them together the bible doesn't tie mormonism to god the bible has nothing to do with mormonism god has nothing to do with mormonism and that's right i'm frustrated because there are so many people that are struggling with belief and yet they're being told from all sides of the church if you walk away you lose everything i mean brad wilcox made that clear in those talks that got him in trouble and um it's just it's not true and obviously there are a ton of of people who have left mormonism who thrive elsewhere but i do believe that with these stories we're talking about with regard to biblical scholarship you can still find a lot of value and meaning in them um even if you don't take them as literally you just can't do that with mormonism because of the fact that they make them so literal totally and yeah i margie and i stayed mormon for 13 years after we knew it wasn't true so people can still stay in the church mormon church even after they know it's all or the truth claims are generally not true um that's just a personal decision but i we just think it's important for people to know the truth because as we started this episode so many important life so if you have a queer kid if your kids gay or transgender if you if your kid's thinking about a mission or if your daughter wants a career uh it's probably pretty significant um that you know the church's truth claims aren't accurate and that the profiteers and revelators really don't know what they're talking about a lot of the time because you you and your kids might make very different decisions if if you know the truth let's uh let's jump to another really insulting distraction by fair mormon where for fair mormon basically says don't worry about the global flood other religions get it wrong too yeah and this is you know we kind of kind of mentioned this already now but it's just from this is from fair mormon they say although this criticism can be directed at the lds church it r it is really directed at anyone who believes in a literal reading of the old and new testament lds leaders have in the past taught the concept of a global flood based upon such a reading we will continue to learn to learn more a lot of line upon line as we create more effective ways to understand this issue and again we've already i've already mentioned this but this impacts any religion that believes in the old testament but mormonism uh takes it expands on it cements it changes it by putting adam and eve in missouri which puts noah in missouri and so all of these things within mormonism are different so you cannot equate the belief of say you know a jewish believer and a um catholic or just a mainstream christian believer with mormonism because joseph smith doesn't just double down he doubles down he triples down you know um and he just keeps like i said hammering this down there's no way around it and so can i add something to that yeah go ahead yeah it's not just that it's that the argument of other churches do it too undermines the whole value proposition of mormonism yes we're supposed to do it right right we have the prophecies and revelators that talk to god and and we get it right so to say that we're not any worse than the other guys again it's like wanting us to rip out the whole first floor of a house yeah and ex apologists want to rip out the whole first floor of a house and they want the second floor to stand but if we're just if we're no worse or no better than the other guys all of a sudden the the question is why why follow mormon profit series and revelators at all yeah and that's like you know you said at the start of the episode like you know our goal isn't to tear down mormonism and and i know that from a believing perspective if you watch these episodes you're gonna say well you're tearing it down and you know it's hard for me to argue with that because to me when you look at the evidence it is going to tear down the correlated mormon narrative so yeah i mean in a lot of ways i when people say that to me i'm like well it's not that i'm tearing it down because i believe if it's true then you have nothing to fear watching this it's just when you are exposed to the evidence and you're exposed to the the ways that apologetics like for example with fair here kind of uh i would say deflect and kind of use a little bit deception how they're you know trying to tie this to other churches um then yeah it's going to be problematic yeah and so i just you know i know people get really upset when you say i'm not trying to tear it down it's just to me this is where the evidence leads and so if the evidence tells you it's not true it's not that i'm tearing it down i'm just telling you what it is and then at that point in your head you're tearing it down because you're understanding this is a problem and so yeah um you know that that's all i'd say and then you know just to kind of start to wrap this up but um this is again from fair mormon and this is about how noah got from missouri to the old world and they say one limited flood explanation that has been proposed for this is that noah built his ark and either went down the mississippi river valley or that he built his ark on the east coast of the north american continent another line of thought is that the placement of the garden of eden or the placement of the garden on the north american continent was more of a symbolic act intended to sacralize the land sacralize sacralized the land thus providing it with its own sacred history similar to that of the old world the truth is however that the biblical description of the location of the garden of eden does not match up with existing old world geography any more than it does with new world geography and so what i would say to this is one the reason that the geography the garden of eden doesn't match up is because it's a mythical story that we talked about in the last one there's also no records of talking serpents in the old world of new world either and so i'm not trying to be flipping i'm just saying like that that's why and to claim that the adam and eve story was joseph smith basically making up a myth to give them early members of the mormon church a sacred history to to basically rally around um it would have if you had me if you had said that if fair mormon goes back in time and they'll say in 1842 they get up and say that joseph smith basically made this up as a symbolic act to give meaning to the land they were at you'd be on trial as an apostate i mean that is just like one of those things where they're only saying it because we know that human humans are not beginning in missouri we know that i mean we know that from from fossils from migrations you could go all sorts of ways so for fair mormon to say that it's just that one is like i'm like really you're gonna say that joseph smith was was saying that to basically give meaning to the people that just it goes against the fact that we have a prophet who's telling us real history yeah yeah yeah and i'm just gonna say we we've been ranting a little bit towards the end and i'm just gonna address that because there's a lot of people who are really loving this series and a few episodes ago i asked people to just let us know if they want us to just keep it really tight and really short and and only just address the science if they want like gerardo or jen or or nemo to come on and overwhelmingly the majority of the respondents are saying they really like the analysis and i'm not i'm not saying that's right or wrong i'm just saying that's what most of you have said and so we just want you to know we're listening to your feedback here because i'm not i'm not trying to just add color i've i have not thought deeply about any of these issues until mike this time with you i've thought on the surface level yeah these are just my honest reactions i i and i i just hope people are valuing this dialogue and this conversation back and forth the only other thing i want to say before we do the concluding slide is that if you watch these on youtube we're putting time codes on here and youtube lets you skip and so if you're in a section and you feel like you've got the point and you want to move on to the next one just use the youtube feature and skip to the next point and you can skip uh mike and i or others kind of like uh analyzing and and and deconstructing each of these points we want to have the best experience as possible and since some of you just want the facts and others you feel you want the analysis we're providing time codes in the youtube description to to facilitate that yeah and the only thing i would add to that is just when we get to apologetics we're going to talk more not because i mean a little bit it's going to be ranting it's just you have to explain for me anyways when i talk about apologetics it's like you got to explain their point but then you have to explain like what are the implications of their point what becomes imbalanced by each apologetic and that's why we do get a little bit more of a long-form conversation because it's a lot easier at the beginning of this episode for us to go through the slides a little quicker because we're talking about just basic scientific concepts of the flood but now we're trying to when we're looking about apologetics and that's why we've got a little bit more lengthy here at the end it's not because we're trying i mean i'm trying not to um to do this in a way that's you know going to come off as angry but you have to explain this in more detail um to understand why when you read the fair mormon responses problems because a lot of people are going to read the fair mormon response and say okay someone's smarter than me has thought about this and i'm done and i'm just trying to point out why they are using a lot of selective tactics in order to ignore what happens when you start to make these apologetics to the scriptures and mormonism as we have them at face value and so that's all i'd add to that totally and i'll just say as well that you know we we have this long decade multiple decade long history of like mormon scholarship with dialogue and sunstone and mormon history journal mormon history and you know lots of scholarship and then we have lots of apologetics and we have you know we have ces letter and the the the essays on mormon stories about the truth claims and we have mormon think and letter from my wife what we know what no one has ever done what's historic about you mike and what i think we're doing here in mormon stories nobody's ever done a multi-part series audio and visual taking on each element of the church's truth claims in order systematically and not just laying out the facts and the evidence but but giving its context and then discussing the implications nobody's ever done it as far as i know like radio free mormon and bill reel have done important stuff mormon stories has done important stuff in this way if it's on thrones did your polygamy but nobody has nobody has ever done what what what we're doing mike i don't mean to sound overly important but but this has never been done before and and it needs to be done people need to be able to hear the evidence and then understand the problems with the evidence and that's what we're doing is important again it's like we're not patting ourselves on the back it's just for me doing it this way allows you i'm patting you on the back well thanks yeah but no i mean i wouldn't even do it but it's just like for me and this is why doing this overview project was so helpful to me to put this in into some different perspective which is to say you know a lot of times like what you guys have done what bill reel and radio free mormon have done um they'll they'll cover these really important topics with people who can again run circles around me but a lot of times um we we talk about the these issues in an episode and then the next episode might be something different and by doing it this way it's kind of forcing us to have to look at the previous episodes and we go to the next one so it's kind of like watching a tv show for a season and you've got these things are building and so when we talk about these issues they have common threads they build upon each other and that's why i think it's important to look at it this way because a lot of times we want to just look at one problem walk away from it go to another problem away from it but they're connected and so when you look at one problem and then you go to the next and then you go holy cow not only is that a problem but it stems off of this first problem and those are the ways i think that helps to understand again i've said this a lot but just how joseph smith was doing it but also it shows his shortcomings because some of his shortcomings are also patterns that we see in the in these truth claims issues as well and it's important to keep noting them as we go kind of in a linear timeline of these episodes so that people who are watching them can understand that they're not in isolation they're actually all fitting together in a very natural way which is a good thing when you're trying to figure it out and to me like i said i've said before it's kind of a satisfying feeling to be able to put it together put the puzzle together and have the pieces fit but it does take a little bit of of getting not necessarily like too deep in the weeds but trying to spend time going over the implications because you have to understand the implications because they will fit into future episodes they have fit in the past episodes and we just want people to understand that these all go into the bigger picture and they're not just us kind of throwing something out now when we're not going to go back to it because we will kind of reference these episodes as we go because of the fact that they do fit into the pattern yeah and in that spirit i'll also add to the show notes what we're creating is a youtube playlist and what that allows you to do is we're going to have all these episodes in order in a single playlist so what it gives you is literally um a link a single link you can go to that's gonna allow you to start with episode one and just binge watch one to the next to the next to the next all in one consolidated list and we may even release this as its own podcast feed so that people can do that in audio form and they don't have to jump in the mormon storage feed of four episodes and then the next one and then four episodes in the next one we're probably gonna create its own podcast feed all right so let's conclude this discussion with your final slide about the global flood yeah and so basically just to wrap up you know as we covered at the beginning the global flood is an ideological myth which is heavily based on earlier myths such as the babylonian epica gilgamesh as we cover there's just so many parallels you can't really ignore that um and the problem is that joseph cements these myths from genesis as literal history by writing them directly into the scriptures and the revelations of mormonism um while apologetics would like to say that we can believe in a localized flood it doesn't work well with the fact that we have adam and eve in missouri and then they would have to get to the old world which means there'd have to be a local flood in america that would carry them to the old world and then the old world people believe the global flood it's just you start to get into that kind of compounded problem and then again just talking about how joseph smith uses a 19th century worldview of the bible he's not even using the old testament as it was written he's using it through the perspective of a 19th century christian which leaves a lot of fingerprints such as we talk about in the book of moses when they talk about in the book of moses being baptized in the name of jesus which would i mean it's beyond anachronistic to have that in um you know what was purported to be an ancient text at the time of the global flood and so all of these things are showing us kind of the window into joseph smith's thinking when he's creating these scriptures but at the same time it's also giving us tangible and testable truth claims to test and over time as we've already discussed between science and the text themselves we can tell the truth claims of mormonism do not hold up when it comes to the global flood all right well today has been amazing every single one of these episodes for me mike and i've been doing this i don't know 30 years in one way or another every one of these episodes is a has been a mind blower for me so i can't wait for the next one what's the next one so the next one's gonna be tower of babel so that'll be kind of building off of this because obviously it's gonna come right after this and that will again impact directly into the book of mormon and um you know we'll see kind of the same elements yeah all right mike thanks for everything you do thanks everybody you take care thanks to everyone for listening and uh and and again thanks for supporting us today on mormon stories podcast we couldn't do this without your support we need your support to be able to continue uh we lose donors every month and uh it costs it costs us to be able to do this so if you want to see this continue both for you and for future generations uh please consider donating to this work you can go to mormonstories.org click on the donate button become a monthly donor whatever you can afford we're tax deductible in the u.s you can donate deduct it from your taxes um we're transparent in our finances so you can see where the money goes and a hundred percent of our of the money is going to go to uh providing informed consent for mormons and non-mormons and everyone in the world about mormonism supporting mormons in faith crisis and then supporting transitioning mormons uh away from the church help them build a happy and a healthy life um outside of mormonism to find community and to prevent depression and anxiety and divorce and all the things that too often unfortunately accompany mormon faith crises so please support us if you can mormonstories.org become a monthly donor support the lds discussions project and please check out ldsdiscussions.com uh this essay which is at slash flood lds discussions dot com slash flood this essay is there plus so many more essays that were we have covered or will cover plus there's a whole deep dive into the book saints um and so many other cool things uh please check that website out thanks everyone and we'll see you guys all again soon on another episode of mormon stories