After re-working Genesis 1 in my God Made Everything story I took a quick look at Genesis 2, which hints at where the Garden of Eden was originally located. Apparently this is where a stream divided into four rivers: the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris and the Euphrates. The latter two still run directly through Iraq and into the Persian Gulf, but the Pishon and Gihon are no longer there. Hence, finding Eden is made more difficult. However, since the two extant rivers do not (at least not now) rise in the same place, the location of the missing rivers is arguably irrelevant.

The ancient people who wrote the legends of the Bible would identify with major features of the areas in which they lived, and since the Tigris and Euphrates are most certainly real, I don't doubt that the Pishon and Gihon were once real rivers (albeit probably not rising from the same source, in the Garden of Eden). But rivers are often lost. They may silt up and dramatically change direction, or their water sources may be blocked, diverted or run dry completely. Climate change, erosion, or even man-made effects such as the diversion of water for irrigation, may all end in 'death' for a river. Even the rivers which do still exist almost certainly do not follow the same course as they did hundreds, and certainly thousands, of years ago.

Still, I tried to find out if any efforts had been made to find the lost Pishon and Gihon rivers. This page, although not scholarly in itself, summarises some of what is known about the Pishon River:

The Pishon River - Found!
A scientist from Boston University, Farouk El-Baz, taking clues from alluvial deposits in Kuwait, carefully examined satellite photos of the Arabian peninsula. There he spotted the unmistakable signs of a river channel cutting across the desert. Originating in the Hijaz Mountains near Medina and the Cradle of Gold, the ancient waterway, currently concealed beneath sand dunes, runs northeast to Kuwait. Dubbed the Kuwait River by its modern discoverer, it once joined the Tigris and Euphrates at the head of the Persian Gulf. Then because of climate changes, it dried up, the archaeologists say, sometime between 3500-2000 BC.

Again, I have no dispute with the archaeology. The valleys of long-dead rivers are common enough, and often lead to the discovery of ancient towns or cities, long-since abandoned when the river changed it course and could no longer provide water, trade or transport for the local population.

What struck me about the article itself was the fact that the author describes the destructive effects of the Biblical Flood (ie the one mentioned in the Noah's Ark story) as removing all traces of the Garden of Eden, so that it can no longer be identified. Once more, this is a potentially valid argument. Such a flood, if it was sufficiently violent, would indeed destroy vegetation over huge areas... 'the whole world' being a 'huge area'.

However, and this is the point I have been labouring towards, isn't the Flood supposedly responsible for all the sedimentary rocks on the planet? According to fundamentalist teachings, and for that look no further than the Creation Museum, the Flood covered the whole world, and after killing everything, it embedded the dead animals, eventually becoming fossils, in rock strata, often hundreds of metres thick. So you'll forgive me for wondering: if the Flood covered the planet, and created all these thick layers of rock, how come the Euphrates and Tigris were not completely filled in? How come two rivers exist today which have the same names as those recorded in Genesis (ie pre-Flood times)?

Once the Flood waters subsided (and you'll forgive me if I continue as if the Biblical Flood actually happened in the world-encompassing manner told to us by fundies), the land would undoubtedly have been a completely blank canvas. Imagine pouring a deep layer of concrete onto an uneven surface to imagine what I'm getting at here. Only some freak coincidence would have led to two rivers (or more if we include the Pishon, which later dried up, as per the article) carving out the same channels as before, but presumably many meters higher, given the thick layers of Flood material deposited below them.

Since the Tigris and Euphrates do still exist, it would be logical to assume that if there was a major flood in the region, even one which covered the area in many metres of water, eventually the flood waters simply subsided, left the usual silty deposits which all flooded rivers leave behind (the economic strength of Ancient Egypt depended on the annual floods of the Nile), and the rivers continued on in their original channels.

It's not just the location of the mythical Garden of Eden which is lost. Also lost is the common sense of those who seek to latch onto one set of 'evidence for Biblical accuracy' without realising that this automatically disqualifies the validity of some other part of the Bible. If the Flood really did cover the entire Earth, and desposited huge layers of fossil-bearing rocks, the rivers mentioned in Genesis 2 would no longer exist. They would be different rivers, with different names, running over vastly different landscapes. If the Flood was not as catastrophic as is described in the Bible... well, the whole 'God killed everyone in the Flood' story is simply revealed as being totally false.

The truth is very simple. Almost certainly, ancient peoples were devastated by one or more floods which, to them, covered their 'whole world'. The survivors passed down the stories orally, embellishing them over time, until they were finally written down after being attributed to the vengeful act of an angry God. Later, much later, Fundamentalist Christians who wanted to disprove scientific knowledge which contradicted their 'perfect, true and inerrant' Bible stories, invented the whole 'dinosaurs were on the Ark, the Flood made the fossils' story and hoodwinked as many gullible people as they could.

Geology (that annoying thing called 'science' strikes again) says that the Flood story cannot be true if the Garden of Eden story is also true. The simplest explanation is that neither of them are true, and both are just ancient legends which are as closely related to real events as are the legends of King Arthur or Robin Hood.

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References:
Euphrates
Tigris
Pishon (note its mention in the post-Flood book of Ecclesiasticus)
Gihon