I heard something extremely strange on NPR the other day. Lisa See is the author of Dragon Bones, a thriller/mystery/intrigue novel about thrilling mysterious intrigue set around the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze. She was reading a commentary (which can be listened to here) about how the recent completion of the dam is the fulfillment of a dream that has been held by Chinese leaders for thousands of years. It was a pretty good listen, as she talked about how the Great Wall is not necessarily the symbol of national Chinese pride that many assume it is. The emperor who built it killed a bunch of people and ground up their bones to put in the bricks and mortar with which the wall was constructed, so many Chinese have mixed feelings about it. Anyway, she was discussing how the Yangtze likes to flood and kill people, and always has. She said that one of the first "mythical" emperors of China, over 4000 years ago, was "charged with the task of draining the land of a massive flood." And then she said the following:

[This flood was] one that many scholars believe was just a portion of the worldwide flood that Noah survived.

Excuse me? Scholars? What scholars are these? Perhaps Henry Morris and his compatriots at ICR? Or maybe the guys referenced in the camp classic In Search of Noah's Ark? (Whoops, same set of people.) What in the world is she talking about? I wonder if she means mythologists who study how explanatory myths and stories relate from culture to culture, and how they are often influenced by one another. I don't even know if that's true, but it sounds good. I just want to give See the benefit of the doubt, and assume that she's talking about something other than "scholars" who "agree" that "Noah's flood" was an "objective historical event", the evidence for which is "found in cultures all over the world". But I'm not sure what to think. She did use the word "mythical" to describe the ancient emperor, and she even mentioned that he used "magical dirt" and enlisted the aid of "dragons" in draining the water. So how can she turn around and talk so matter-of-factly about "scholars" and the Noachian flood? "Just a portion" of Noah's flood? What does that mean? So everybody wasn't killed in the biblical deluge? A bunch of Chinese people lived? Why? Were they good pre-Christ-myth Christians? How did that happen? Some historians conjecture that the Noah's flood story was based on an actual flood that might have occurred at roughly the right time, which, to those affected, would have seemed like a worldwide flood. Even if this were true, how could this have possibly affected people in China? And See clearly uses the word "worldwide". I'm not here to change the minds of creationists, but there is a veritable dearth of evidence to support the hypothesis that the entire earth was suddenly covered in water somewhere in the last three to ten thousand years, just like there is a surprising lack of evidence to support the theory that the sun turned into a potted bromeliad for a few days in the year 249 B.C.E. There just wasn't a worldwide flood. So what, exactly, is See talking about?