Biblical literalism vs science

I grew up in Tennessee, the land of the Scopes trial. The molar concentration of Southern Baptists was high there (and still is). My senior year in high school, the Biology II teacher began the section on evolution by asking whether anyone had issues with teaching evolution science. Nobody stated an objection, so we continued with the science. 

There are all sorts of fables in the Bible that fly in the face of science. Of course, the bible was written, not as a record of history but as a set of religious stories to promote a certain strain of monotheism. As I learned a long time ago, science teaches us how, religion teaches us why. As Stephen J. Gould put it, separate magisteria.

Same with the Noachian Flood story. As history, it’s risible.

“Over the last few years in my evolution class, I bring up some of the claims made about the biological accuracy of the Noah’s Ark narrative. The students were fascinated to learn that some think that Noah brought dinosaurs on the Ark; naturally, questions began to fly. The first is, inevitably, how could there be two velociraptors on the boat and any other animals left alive? Or, there was a dinosaur that was 6 stories high, how’d that work? When I pointed out that some have claimed that Noah might have brought juveniles, or fed them plants or meal worms, the eye rolling was dizzying.

 

“One of the students made an amazing point that I had missed – if Noah had taken animals from deserts, prairies, tropical rain forests, polar ice caps, etc., when the flood waters receded, were their environments just like before and full of food? It’s hard to imagine flood waters disappearing and the tropical rain forest reappearing intact.”

There are plenty of other problems with the science of the flood myth. It's sad to me that there are still people who cling to biblical literalism rather than using their God-given gift of reason.

https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2025/04/if-noah-were-alive.html#more