Der Trihs, I generally agree with everything you post (that I’ve read)…but cm’on, you know as well as I do that what was meant was something like “the Bible, like many compilations of myths and historical accounts, surely contains plenty of passages that have some basis in some real person or event”.
Depends…what IS truth? 
There is no evidence for it, and it runs counter to our understanding of physics, meteorology and…well, everything else. If you have a magical world view, however, then all things are possible to a being that could create the universe. At any rate, the meaning seemed clear enough to me.
-XT
OK, here is what I got so far. The quick answer is the environment provided by Mother Earth will guide the animal kind to evolve to the result Mother Earth wants. It is like a mother guiding her child to adulthood with a carrier, each child guided differently to their end result. The limits are what the child’s makeup is, like this child can do X,Y, or Z but will not do A,B, orC, so what the mother can mold the child into is limited by in this case the father. more on that below.
The longer answer:
Mother Earth is a angel. Angels do not marry according to scripture, but God is very heavy in the be fruitful and multiply. So there is a lot of boinking in heaven and lots of children.
Each animal ‘kind’ may be from a different male mating partner with Mother Earth. The reason for Noah to save each kind was so Mother Earth will not lose a makeup of a child.
Though Mother Earth molds the ‘child’ into many forms (species) there is a limit, the Father of that ‘kind’, who would also be a angel. The mother does not have total control (therefore evolution can’t push something too far) and the apple can’t fall that far from the tree (aspects of the father will be maintained).
BRRRRRRWAAAAHHHH? Did anyone else feel the gears of reality slip there? What are you talking about?
-XT
I shouldn’t speak for OneMissedPost, but I don’t think that’s what he/she meant…rather, that there may be some grain of factual “truth” which the Noah story is a fabulated version of…some real, ordinary flood, in other words.
But your point is also a good one…that there’s little use in trying to point out logical inconsistencies, or physical impossibilities, to a holy-book-literalist, because their god is all-powerful enough to patch up any iffy bits.
But I begrudgingly do give kanicbird credit for trying anyway. If nothing else, he at least managed to salvage what I though for sure was a doomed and superfluous thread, and turn it into a Great Debate of sorts.
Well, IIRC the Noah story was found in clay tablets from Mesopotamia from long before the Bible was written (and the story was changed from a barge and some animals and ‘Noah’s’ family to what we see in the bible today), so if we are talking about the story…yeah, it pre-dates the Bible version by hundreds or even a thousand years. But there is still no archeological evidence for the actual events…just archeological evidence for the story outside of bible sources.
I didn’t think of that when I read OMP’s post though, so good catch.
He get points for originality, at any rate.
-XT
Especially with that last post! :eek:
I should have phrased that a little better. Right, it isn’t truth… AT ALL. It’s just a story.
I’m not even sure what to say to this? Your THC content must be way higher than mine. I bow to your superior weed.
The gears are clearly stripped clean of any resistance. :smack:
No, wait, I’ve got it: The “kinds” within which evolution is constrained are bacteria, archae, and eucaryotes. So Noah only needed to carry six critters with him (or maybe 18, if they were clean). There, that solves the whole problem, without the need for any of that pesky macroevolution.
I always thought it kind of sad that all the dinosaurs were too evil to be allowed on the ark. 
-XT
Wait, wait - you mean to say that the Noah story may not be a literally accurate depiction of historical events? Get out of here, you heretical thinker, you! What next, dancing?!
It’s a bold ‘theory’, and an even bolder stance for a poster to take around here! I salute the OP for such boldness in the face of likely replies around here.
Nomnomnomnom…
-XT
This was suposed to be Great Debates. The moderators are surely in a party with Uncla Cecil.
Noah’s Ark story, as every other story in the Genesis, is not meant to be taken as a literal truth. Only fundamentalist christian (mostly in the US) believe otherwise. I was raised as a catholic in Argentina and the first time I learnt that some people considered the whole Bible as a literal truth was when I read in the news about some crazy sect, which name I don’t want to remember.
“Meant to be” is ambiguous. “Meant” by whom? Some take it as literal truth (as you yourself stated). Others take it as a mildly interesting myth/story in a book that’s full of 'em. You seem to take it as something in between – not “literal truth”, but as something nonetheless “special” because it happens to be in a book that is special to the religion you were raised in.
When you write “…is meant to be…”, you are implying that your branch of the Christian church is better at conveying the intent of the originators of the myth. I think that is quite presumptuous. The myth surely predates its being written down at all by centuries, and it predates Christianity by millenia. Most likely, the Bronze Age originators of the myth regarded it basically as literal truth.
I think it’s great that the Catholic church is not generally hard-line literalist when it comes to Biblical stuff – you’re right, the US fundamentalists are whackjobs – but don’t let that hold you back from taking the next step, and just tossing it all out as something just as interesting as the Epic of Gilgamesh, no more and no less.
Actually, I don’t. Not only did OneMissedPost say that they just worded it poorly, but I more than half expected some handwaving about God having a different sort of truth and we can’t judge God’s Truth by our merely human standard of truth. Substitute “morality” for “truth” and people trying to defend Christianity say that sort of thing pretty often, after all.
Revisionism. It was created and passed along by primitives who didn’t know better, and now that we know better we claim that it was meant as some sort of metaphor rather than admit it’s simply a compilation of fantasies and errors. Because if we admit that it’s simply wrong then there’s no reason to assume that the rest of the fantastic claims of the Bible aren’t wrong as a whole.
Not necessarily. It could be something as simple as a kid asking “Daddy, where did people come from?”, and the father, not knowing, followed in the grand paternal tradition of making something up without actually believing it. Just because it then got passed down through the ages doesn’t mean any of the folks doing the passing down believed it, either, just that they thought it was a good story. There have been plenty of folk tales passed down that way in more recent times, even though we’re quite certain that no adult ever believed them (see, for instance, any number of stories about Pecos Bill, or Kipling’s Just So stories).
I have always wondered how he decided how to distribute the different species on the different continents before he sailed back to the Middle East?
Right. So problems only arise when one demands both a literal interpretation and a fully naturalistic one… which is only going to happen if there are folks who insist that the story must be read as literally true, but aren’t allowed to simply say “a wizard did it” as explanation… the Diluvian counterparts of the Intelligent Design crowd presumably.
(And this perplexes me further in that it requires a fully literal reading of an explicitly supernatural event while excluding the supernatural part – that sort of cognitive dissonance makes my head hurt).
I think we can be confident that he went to Australia either first (and took the opportunity to off-load the bulk of the venomous beasts) or last (which explains the left-over animals like the platypus).