Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Ancient Apocalypse vs. God

 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers... 2 Peter 3:3

"In late 2022, streaming-giant Netflix released an eight-part
documentary series titled Ancient Apocalypse, featuring investigative journalist Graham Hancock. Reportedly, the show garnered 25 million viewing hours in just a week and soared to Netflix’s top 10 list in 31 countries. 
Throughout the series, Hancock visits a variety of ancient sites in an attempt to prove his view that an advanced human civilization existed before the so-called “last ice age” and was wiped out by a massive flood over 12,000 years ago. The few survivors then traveled the world, spreading the knowledge of architecture, math, astronomy, and agriculture to hunter-gatherer societies.
While rejecting much of mainstream archaeology’s interpretations and assumptions about the rise of civilization, Hancock still accepts long ages and many conventional geological and anthropological time frames. He rejects the Bible’s history in episode one, lumping the Biblical account of Noah’s flood in with ancient flood myths. Because he has the wrong starting point, he, like mainstream archaeologists, comes to the wrong conclusions.
---According to the only eyewitness testimony of all of history, God created life and the universe around 6,000 years ago, including two
people who were intelligent (made in the image of God) right from the very beginning. They didn’t stumble around dumbly for millennia trying to figure out weapons, tools, farming, and fire. Rather, they were created with intelligence, and within just a few generations from the first man, Adam, “early” man was raising domesticated livestock, making and playing musical instruments, and working with bronze and iron. Genesis 4:17 even mentions building cities just one generation after Adam. In other words, civilization is nearly as old as human history.
God judged their sin with a worldwide flood around 4,350 years ago (not the massive, localized flooding Hancock believes took place) which destroyed every living air-breathing animal and person not saved onboard Noah’s ark. Human civilization was utterly destroyed, and no remains of whatever had been built or invented in the pre-flood world before Noah and his family entered the ark has ever been (or likely will ever be) found.
---Soon afterward, the conditions created by the flood (warm oceans
from volcanic and tectonic activity and cool continents from ash and particles in the atmosphere reflecting sunlight) caused an ice age, burying one-third of earth beneath monstrous glaciers. This event dramatically lowered global sea levels, exposing land bridges between continents and islands and opening up coastlines for settlement. Several hundred years later, the glaciers retreated, water poured back into the oceans, and sea levels rose, engulfing seaside settlements and swallowing land bridges.
But because Hancock accepts much of the evolutionary narrative, he also fails to properly understand our anthropology. He gets some things right: flood legends around the world exist and must be explained somehow (though he explains them wrongly), human civilization can’t spring from nothing, and mankind’s history does appear to be more complex than perhaps many archaeologists believe.
---Keep in mind that it appears that Noah’s sons and grandsons were deified by their later descendants, which might explain the “demigod” status given to many of these “civilizing heroes” in the legends. This deification was likely the result of the long (hundreds of years) lifespans of the first generations after the flood, that steeply drop off so that early ancestors outlived their great-grandchildren. It would seem they “lived forever,” and this illusion, perhaps combined with their advanced knowledge, gave rise to these demigod, civilizing hero myths.
Another common thread in many ancient cultures, according to Hancock, is the imagery of the serpent (most obviously seen as Serpent Mound in Ohio in this series). Why were these ancient cultures fascinated with serpents?
Could these serpents be a memory of the serpent that tempted and deceived Eve into sin in the garden of Eden? Perhaps! In fact, there has never been a greater cataclysm than the fall of man, deceptively influenced by the serpent in Eden.
Throughout Ancient Apocalypse, Hancock regularly attempts to place dates on the various archaeological sites he visits. Sometimes these dates are the conventional dates assigned by secular archaeologists. Other times, they are wildly different and are often reached based on archeoastronomy.
Archeoastronomy, the “astronomy of the ancients,” is a discipline that, in Ancient Apocalypse, attempts to map out the location of stars in the past and relate that to how the ancients may have built or oriented their buildings.
For example, in episode three, Hancock demonstrates that if you turn the sky backward, starting at 9000 BC and going forward, the megalithic temples in Malta, which are all oriented slightly differently, all eventually (over millennia) align to the brightest star in their night sky—Sirius. He uses this as evidence for his preferred dates for these sites.
Q: What’s the problem? 
A: Well, archeoastronomy is not without its problems, not the least of which is that it is a computer model. And, as with all computer models, the parameters and data the researchers feed the model influence the results. Wrong assumptions—such as the use of a 9000 BC initial date and assumption that the orientation of these temples must be due to some astronomical phenomenon, despite the lack of evidence at the sites that such is the case—fed into the program result in wrong conclusions and wrong dates.
Don’t let titles like “Once There Was a Flood” (the name of episode one) deceive you into thinking Hancock is espousing even a semi-Biblical worldview.....Graham Hancock's Ancient Apocalypse uses a lot of catastrophic, almost-worldwide-devastation language that, to many Christians, may sound reminiscent of the Biblical flood of Noah’s day and may make some want to think of him as “in our camp” (or at least closer to it). But Hancock doesn’t think there was a worldwide flood like the one the Bible describes." AIG