Secular historians advance the argument that
the spate of flood myths found everywhere around the globe is the natural
result of local peoples preserving stories about local floods. These do not,
the experts say, provide evidence for the truthfulness of the Genesis flood
account.
That line of reasoning makes a certain sort
of superficial sense: there are lots of local floods, and some of the flood
stories out there are surely a product of those. But some are not. When you
actually examine the content of these flood stories more closely, you find that
a non-trivial number of them have features in common with the book of Genesis,
and therefore with each other, that no local experience and lore can explain.