Sober Philosophy: Genesis chapters 6-9 (Robert presents)

About this event

# The next time you observe the downtown Seattle skyline, picture a heap of ice the height of the Space Needle. Then use your imagination to double the height of that heap. Then double it all again. Then add yet another six hundred feet of ice on top of that. It might seem like a fantastical image, maybe even an impossible one. But in fact, just 17,000 years ago during the last Glacial Maximum, the entire Puget Sound region *was* buried under that much ice. So were most of what would become the northern contiguous United States, along with Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. So were northern and western Europe, and southern South America. Extensive ice caps and massive ice streams filled valleys across the Himalayas and Central Asia. Even tropical and subtropical peaks hosted substantial glaciers, including African mountains, the New Guinea highlands, and the tropical Andes. The Antarctic Ice Sheet was also significantly larger and thicker than it is now. So much of the water on Earth was glaciated that global sea levels averaged 400 feet lower than today. For over one hundred millennia, ice absolutely dominated vast swathes of the surface of our planet. Then, within a span of just a few thousand years, virtually all of it melted. One of the most widespread motifs in world mythology is “the World Flood.” Variations on the theme appear across continents, between cultures that developed in compete isolation from each other. In Mesopotamian mythology, Utnapishtim is warned of a divine plan to drown humanity in a flood. He builds a massive ark to preserve animals and seeds, and survives a devastating storm before grounding on Mount Siris. In Greek tradition, Zeus decides to wipe out wicked humanity with a massive deluge. Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha alone escape, by building a floating chest, and then go on to repopulate the world. In Andean mythology, the creator god Viracocha drowns a race of evil giants with a great flood. Mesoamerican cosmology describes a ancient…