Cosmos Articles and Discussion Guides See Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey for reviews of other episodes and discussion guides for further study.

"The Immortals," episode 11 of Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, exploits the metaphorical value of Noah's Ark in a series of evolutionary themes while, not surprisingly, treating the biblical account as just a spin-off of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. Though admitting that evolutionists do not know how life could have evolved from lifeless elements through naturalistic processes, Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson assumes that it did. Then he weaves tales of how primordial life-forms could have found an ark of safety through Earth's presumed history of multiple catastrophic surface-destroying collisions.

"Must We Die?"

"Must we die?" asks Tyson as the episode opens. The opening words point to the motivation of Gilgamesh in the famous ancient Akkadian epic. Gilgamesh, the hero of the tale that includes one of the oldest flood legends to be written down, searches for immortality. But the question expresses a concern unique to human beings. We humans are aware that we will die, concerned about what will happen to us after we die, and interested in leaving some sort of legacy marking our significance to future generations. Some people blame God for the death and suffering that intrude upon our lives.

By understanding our true history we can understand the origin of suffering and death. God created a perfect world but warned Adam that disobedience would result in death. Man rebelled, and therefore we must die ( Romans 5:12–21 ) and face our Creator ( Hebrews 9:27–28 ). However, eternal life is given to everyone who repents and trusts in the sacrificial death of God's Son Jesus Christ ( John 3:16–18 ; John 3:36 ; Romans 3:23; 6:23 ).

With the written word we can preserve our thoughts and share them with future generations. Tyson describes this as a sort of immortality. Yet thanks to the written Word of God in the Bible, the good news of how to obtain eternal life is available to people all over the world.

Writing and Cities

After the global Flood about 4,350 years ago, humans—the descendants of Noah's family—got the opportunity to once again civilize the world. Defying God's command to spread out, they initially confined themselves to Mesopotamia, as described in Genesis 10 and 11. Therefore, after the Lord confused languages and forced the people to disperse from the Tower of Babel,1 civilization already had a head start in the "land between the rivers."

In the post-Flood world, the first cities were built in this region ( Genesis 10:10 ). The people descended from Noah's family were intelligent and literate. They left written records of their presence—poems, school exercises, trade notes, and so on. Tyson claims ancient Mesopotamian places "invented" cities and writing. Yet only evolutionary thinking would deceive us to think that the pre-Flood people lacked intelligence, literacy, and complex social structure—yet Adam was even credited with a book that is mentioned by Moses ( Genesis 5:1 ).

The book of Genesis, written by Moses under the inspiration of God, reports some pre-Flood history. Moses, as he recorded the early history of man, may well have had access to copies of records of pre-Flood genealogies preserved by Noah. The first recorded city was built by Cain, according to Genesis 4:17 . The Bible records that those early generations made musical instruments, worked iron, and were highly skilled ( Genesis 4:21–22 ). Ancient Mesopotamia was simply the first place where civilization restarted after the global Flood.

Gilgamesh and Noah

The Epic of Gilgamesh contains one of the hundreds of flood legends that abound in cultures all over the world. These legends are ubiquitous because all people in the world are descendants of Noah's family, the only people to survive the global Flood.

The biblical global Flood happened about 4,350 years ago. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which contains a distorted account of the Flood, was written down in Mesopotamia, in the general region from which Abraham came. And it was probably written down on clay tablets at a time closer to Abraham's day than to Moses' time. Moses, inspired by God ( 2 Peter 1:21 ), wrote down the authentic account of the Flood, and it is preserved in the book of Genesis. Tyson asserts that the Akkadian epic, because it was written earlier than the Mosaic account, was the source of the Old Testament account. However, the source was the shared history of a real global Flood, not a shared piece of literature.

There is no justification for supposing the true history in the Bible to be a spin-off of the Gilgamesh epic.

The biblical historical account, recorded under the