[djmcmath]

Fun question. Don Richardson has a great book on the topic, "Eternity in their hearts." The fundamental premise is that there exist countless examples (as you list a few above, some of which are more analagous than others) where missionaries or explorers came upon undiscovered peoples only to find that they already knew of a God that looked remarkably like the Christian God. If you assume, as most normal people do, that such people lived their lives in complete isolation from the "Christianized" world, then they should have no such knowledge. Finding one or two such cases could be written off as coincidence, some fluke of human development that causes us to make up stories like this...... but we don't find one or two, we find dozens. Yes, that's right -- dozens of "primitive" cultures carry stories via the oral tradition of a great flood, of a single sovereign creator, and of a single saviour who would come. Obviously all of the human race started _somewhere_, and when we all parted ways, there had to have been some common stories that we all told. The fact that we all tell the same stories is a worthwhile piece in the puzzle.



Let me put it another way. You're sitting there in your office, and someone comes to you with an absurd tale about how he heard that some guy flipped his car 6 times, then crawled out and walked away from the accident. You laugh it off, because that's silly. Shortly afterwards, someone else comes up and says, "Dude, I just saw this guy flip his car 4 times! He crawled out and walked away from it!"

At what point do you come to the realization that there must be some truth behind all of this nonsense you're hearing? At what point do you say "This isn't coincidence. There must be something here?" When do you decide that truth is worth knowing?