I hate to break it to you, but Noah’s Flood is not a real thing. As geologist David Montgomery wrote in his recent history, The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood, the religious idea that the Flood was real has been important to the actual history of geology as a science. But by now, however, science knows better. I can’t say as much for the media.

Drumming up attention for Christiane Amanpour’s two-part special “Back to the Beginning," (concluding this evening) of which the search for Noah’s Flood is but a small part, ABC TV’s promotional materials give life to the old myth: “now an acclaimed underwater archaeologist thinks he has found proof that the biblical flood was...