Noah, the Flood and the Day without a Yesterday

by Christopher Barr

“For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs – as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.”   - Charles Darwin

Noah tells the fictional, not historic story of a man that has been tasked by the creator of the world to build an ark in preparation for a mass flooding of the planet.  The creator, because of man’s selfishness, misuse and abuse of his creation, decided to flood the world to cleanse it of all its wickedness.  Behind all the biblical proportions lies a story about obedience, obsession and death, where a man edges the border of his own sanity to complete what's required of him.  Noah was about responsibility and follow through, regardless of the cost personally, it was about survival’s guilt as Noah was forced to watch all of earth’s sinners wash away into the deep, making this film about destruction but also about rebirth.

The film was beautifully shot and the acting was top notch.  I loved the haunting score and the visual effects were stunning.  I especially liked a scene where Noah told the story of creation to the five other people on the ark just after the flood hit.  The story was of the big bang of science leading into the evolution of many species on earth, and ending with the Garden of Eden to make the religious people happy, seeings this allegory is from their lesson book .  It looked great and they showed during the very early stage of our planet, an asteroid hitting the earth creating the moon which was visually stunning to see.  Also the quick editing bouncing from species to species was mesmerizing.

Noah played out like a fictional tale just in the same way as Batman does.  It is a story based on a story and in both cases they arrived through the imaginations of men.  Programmed beliefs are all that religion has to validate this story as something factual.  This story in actual reality simply doesn’t float, whether it’s the - too many animals problem or the ark structural integrity problem, or the altitude after the flood would have frozen everything.  Freshwater fish species would have all died after their water was mixed with salt water, terrestrial vegetation and all other land life would have all died by the time the water receded.  The animals on the ark would have walked off it onto a barren land where there would be no food anywhere to eat, other than each other which I think would have defeated the purpose of sparing them in the first place.  So with that, it is important to look at this movie as a work of fiction so one can suspend their disbelief and sit and enjoy an entertaining adventure story.    

In one of the more visceral scenes I’ve seen in recent years, Noah goes to the city to scout wives for his sons when he stumbles upon the atavistic true nature of men ripping apart each other.  Noah watches in horror as swarms of scavenging people turn savage as they fight for food.  It is there that Noah sees the true nature of men as he sees himself among them, finally realizing that he too is part of this failure.

This realization leads to the most interesting aspect of this film and that is; we must all die in order for the world to live on.  This is when the environmental themes of the film push us to the reality of the current state of the planet today and the future of tomorrow.  This ended up being my favorite part of Noah the film and Noah the character, where he realized what truly needs to be done to save this planet; the extinction of humanity.

Noah’s nemesis in the film, King Tubal-cain saw this planet as a garden for men to feast and do whatever they wish because they are men.  He was the selfish greedy bastard that represents what’s wrong with man and his progress trap that he’s tangled himself up in, costing the environment its land, seas and animals to suffer.  But his one and only argument is because we are men we are entitled, period.  Like in most major religions, this sentiment is shared, because they feel their god, the creator of the universe, made them in his image, they are entitled to hold dominion over this planet and with that entitlement they are killing it with ignorance. 

“Clearly the person who accepts the Church as an infallible guide will believe whatever the church teaches.”  - St. Thomas Aquinas

I would argue that the debate over whether or not god created the universe is one grounded firmly in absurdity.  It’s about filling a space with fantasy because our current understanding of reality can’t fill that space.  The creationists’ debate is; if you can’t prove to them that evolution is a fact or that the universe wasn’t created by an all-knowing architect than they must be right in saying that it was.  They are fuelled by their desire for completeness where science is all too aware of the huge gaps in our understanding of the universe and our planet.

What creationists are not willing to do and what scientists are is remove themselves from the equation when regarding the origins of anything.  Darwin’s theory of Evolution wasn’t a theory about him, his feelings and his inevitable death.  It was about the origins of the species that have and do exist on this planet.  Evolution isn’t motivated by desire like religions pontificate, which I find ironic because the message that is often praised by indoctrinated religious people is there tolerance and open-mindedness; they believe they are right without ever supporting that ‘fact’.

Language was an invention of man and with it came a vaster knowledge of the space outside our heads, outside our homes, outside our villages and towns and the world alike.  What we know and understand about the world we owe to the creation of language.  But we also owe the fantasy about the world to language as well, through our narcissistic desires to be number one, the reigning species on this planet; we have created a story of our superiority that can be only debated within the symbolic world of language itself.  Society has become the madman that locked itself in the padded room.

In the beginning was the word….

Our inability to understand something outside the parameters of language hasn’t stopped us from fictionalizing our past to make our present tolerable.  Creationists’ have zero supportable evidence that validates their version of the origins of humanity, so their weapons of defense are ignorance of knowledge and science, as they corner atheists disproving evolution because that’s all they have.  Atheists do have evidence on their side, they have evolution and a multitude of scientific discovery at their fingertips but yet they are susceptible to debate because religious people have blind faith.  In other words, they obey the lazy man’s pseudoscience; the Book of Genesis, where the story of Noah derives.

The problem is that we are scared of the enormous vastness of the world outside the safety of our religious fantasy.  Science at this point has no idea what occurred before the Big Bang did, other than theories about multi universes swirling around in bubbles of even more multi universes.  Religion has taken science’s inability to answer some of those fundamental questions about the universe as justification for the existence of their creator.  Because knowledge is the biggest threat to religion, they maintain their ignorance about the science of the world in order to believe and permeate insane superstitions. 

In the end the debate is far simpler than people let on; science is evidence based and religion is not.  Science searches desperately to disprove itself, religion says there is no other word than the word in their book.  So the debate isn’t really a debate about religion versus evolution at all, rather it’s a debate about simple-mindedness versus intelligence, ignorance versus logic.  The problem here is simple-thinking people are unable to rise to the level of intelligent people to have a debate grounded in reason and logic.  Conversely, the intelligent people are unable to drop to the likes of simple people and expect to win a debate, especially with people that would die for their religion, that they themselves often don’t even understand because of that simplicity.

Generally the real debate is limited by the language with which it is presented.  The limitation of one’s language hinders a person’s ability to argue the problem they see before them.  So because the debate of religion version evolution is one within language, the conversation is more often than not, lost in translation.

While science maintains its cosmic humility the theists are spreading the gospel of a socially acceptable power-structure in which under the auspices of this imaged superpower.  What they have done in their minds is place themselves in the position of god, which excuses them from unreasoned, unfounded bigotry and pre-judgement by removing the necessity to justify their views or that they can and should be challenged in their opinions.  Their belief in God allows them to have a little bit of their assumed God’s divine power, with the ability to do whatever they choose and to define morality to suit themselves. 

Therein lies the fundamental problem with human beings on this planet; we destroy everything.  The Story of Noah ended with an optimist message of hope but I think it wasn’t what it seemed.  I think it was a wink much in the same way Kevin Costner winked at the end of JFK to the audience to smarten up and fight for the truth.  Noah’s wink is his message of hope failed as we look at the world today with it’s over consumption leading to mass extinction.  I don’t think the film did end with a positive look, but rather a slap in the face to its audience to get their heads out of the sand of their religious dogma, and see that the metaphorical flood is coming and there aren’t any lifeboats in sight. 

“Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven.  I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.”  - Isaac Asimov