Orthodoxy

I just finished listening to G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy (via LibriVox). It is part of a project to work my way through the Bannockburn reading list.
Anyway, it is a book with amazing application. Several points struck me as I listened to it. I used an online version to read back through some that were especially striking. Near the end, Chesterton makes a comment that I have been saying for some time now.

Science knows nothing whatever about pre-historic man; for the excellent reason that he is pre-historic. A few professors choose to conjecture that such things as human sacrifice were once innocent and general and that they gradually dwindled; but there is no direct evidence of it, and the small amount of indirect evidence is very much the other way. In the earliest legends we have, such as the tales of Isaac and of Iphigenia, human sacrifice is not introduced as something old, but rather as something new; as a strange and frightful exception darkly demanded by the gods. History says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was kinder in its earliest time. There is no tradition of progress; but the whole human race has a tradition of the Fall. Amusingly enough, indeed, the very dissemination of this idea is used against its authenticity. Learned men literally say that this pre-historic calamity cannot be true because every race of mankind remembers it. I cannot keep pace with these paradoxes.

I have been telling my students for years that the very fact that almost every ancient civilization on record has a flood narrative is evidence that the thing happened, not evidence it did not. But the modernist would rather believe that every ancient civilization was involved in a mass conspiracy than accept that the Bible could be right about something.