Cosmos & Neil Degrasse Tyson state that Great Flood occurred in Sumeria & retold as Noah's Ark

[muriel_volestrangler]

120. That 'controversial theory' doesn't actually have decent evidence for it

First of all, note that it's in a different place from the OP - the Black Sea, not Sumeria. It's also from thousands of years earlier; rather than the myth being something based on a Sumerian event (when - 2500 BC? That would be about 2000 years before written down for the bible, or perhaps 800 years before it was written down in Babylonian), this was meant to be about 5000 BC - so you're adding another 2500 years for the legend to survive, despite another change in location.

"It probably was a bad day," Ballard said. "At some magic moment, it broke through".

That's not evidence - it's supposition. "He does think he may find evidence" - ie he hasn't found evidence yet. What he has found is that sea level rose, not that it was a sudden flood.

Many people have looked at this, but there isn't any evidence for catastrophic flooding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis . At some stage, the level of the Black Sea rose; but there's evidence for fresh water flowing out of the Black Sea through this period.

Also:

Alas, on the expedition’s return in 2003, the blocks of daub turned out to be chunks of local stone, and the polished stone artifacts turned out to be wood – wood, moreover, that gave radiocarbon dates of no more than 200 years. This was looking less and less like an actual site, but Ballard was not yet prepared to let it go: “Further sampling of Site 82 is clearly necessary to confirm its archaeological nature.” In 2007, however, a formal publication of Ballard’s Black Sea shipwrecks offhandedly dismissed Site 82 as “now considered to represent a geological rather than an archaeological feature.” So much for Site 82. And, since that was his only Black Sea habitation site, so much for his Noachian Atlantis.

But in a recent lecture, Ballard claimed the discovery of another submerged site – not in the Black Sea, but across the Bosporus in the Aegean, off Anzac Beach, and therefore nothing to do with the hypothetical Black Sea deluge. While searching (successfully) for a Great War wreck, he spotted a circular feature “45 metres across with some sort of structure in the middle…probably a site of human habitation 9000 years ago…a Neolithic site, one of the oldest now discovered.” His slides show something that looks remarkably geological to me, possibly a ring dyke or similar feature; at any rate, nothing that justifies Ballard’s blithe claim of a groundbreakingly early Neolithic site on the bed of the Aegean Sea. This does not increase my confidence in Ballard’s archaeological pronouncements.

http://www.skepticink.com/lateraltruth/2012/12/19/robert-ballard-goes-out-of-his-depth/

My "deeply held religious beliefs" on this are that no-one has found any evidence to tie a specific event to the origin of the myth. I'd point out that the myth also include the flood receding; this would point to the author having in mind a 'normal' flood which does go away after some time, not a rise in sea level that remained for hundreds or thousands of years.