by M. Teresa Blaylock

Created on: February 16, 2007   Last Updated: March 03, 2007

I remember my grandmother telling me, "You shouldn't study psychology. It will make an atheist out of you." I was appalled. I thought, "Learning will make an atheist of me?" It turns out that she was right. Education often tends to drive god out of the realm of "reality" and into the realm of myth where he/she/it belongs. That is not to say that all educated people are atheists, or that all people who believe in a divine power are ignorant hicks. In fact, I have come across some very intelligent people who insist that they can prove the existence of god.

One of these arguments is the flood myth in the book of Genesis in the Bible. This is used as an argument to say that the many layers of sediment and such which make up the geologic record are not, in fact, the result of billions of years of time, but rather the result of the massive upheaval purported to have taken place at the time of the Biblical flood. Therefore, according to them, since this part of the Bible is true, then all of it must be true, and god exists!

There are several flaws in this logic, not the least of which is that there are flood stories throughout world mythologies. At least one of these is older than the Biblical myth - the story of Utnapishtim, which many of us have studied in literature class. When this story was discovered, it caused a great hoo-hah among Biblical scholars, some of whom claimed, "See, an earlier source verifies that what the Bible says is true!" Other scholars said, "Hmmm...looks like Biblical mythology matches up with the rest of the world's mythology." There's no great mystery here. It may be true that there was indeed a great flood in the history of the world. However - regardless of whether or not this is the case, it does nothing to prove the existence of god; at the very most, it makes a tenuous case for the validity of a single story in the Bible.

Having said that, let's look at the Bible itself. Fundamentalist Christians would have us believe that it is the "inerrant Word of God - true to every jot and tittle." In other words, god wrote it himself, perhaps in some form of automatic writing, through "the faithful," and every dot of an i and every cross of a t is correct - direct communication from the mind of god. Personally, I find that to be a stretch. For those of you who have studied a second language - have you ever tried to translate any decent amount of material from one language into another? Did it say exactly the same thing? In Spanish, for example,

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