As the resident rattle-shaker here, I suppose it is my duty to chime in.
A short while ago, I engaged an old friend of mine in a conversation regarding the Bible. He's somewhat of a Christian SF writer. He'd found my novel out on Amazon, and we've been discussing it, and a couple of my other writing projects and his current work-in-progress. It's a Horror/SF thing in which Death Incarnate is the main character.
He wanted to know my take on the Bible. Specifically, whether or not the Bible was the literal word of God. My answer was that when I read the Bible, I am transported out of normal day-to-day Reality, and allowed to hear the word of God. Anything else is spurious and irrelevant.
Similarly, I have a view on Noah and The Flood. At the end of the last Ice Age, there was a lot of upheaval on the landscape. There were events that we as modern Humans can barely conceive. As the ice retreated, it left large puddles of freshwater-- some bigger than the Great Lakes. The influx of icemelt also caused the oceans to rise. As the land adjusted great calamities happened. Some were gradual. Some were inconceivably swift.
At one point, a natural dam in North America breached and flooded what eventually became the Mississippi basin. In Europe, the Mediterranean Sea had dried out, and the rising sea levels caused a breach at Gibraltar. First the Western Med filled up, and then spilled over into the Eastern Med. Finally, the Bosphorus was breached, and water filled the Black Sea. The people of the time-- pretty much the entire early population of Mankind had to face a period of cataclysmic flooding. The stories survived. In each case, these events became known as The Flood, because no one had ever seen anything like it before or after. Furthermore, no one had been far enough in the world to have witnessed more than one of these events. Over time, these merged and melded, and eventually, we have The Flood as mentioned in the Bible.
Like the Bible, I find it impossible and absurd to argue whether the Bible is the exact literal word of God. What I do know is that for any one person living in at the end of the last Ice Age, the sheer magnitude of what they witnessed would have put them in touch with the Divine. Watching the Pillars of Atlas breach would have convinced anyone of the power of the Almighty. The big breach in North America, the one that formed The Badlands, would have convinced me that God was afoot in my world.
Now for the money shot: Evolution. Look, I'm a good Methodist boy. It's all God, all God's doing, all God's plan. If Natural Selection is at play, I'm happy to have some insight into God's way of doing things. It doesn't make it less Divine. Did I evolve from a common ancestor of apes? Yes, probably. I'm not sure, However, what I'm sure of is that I've been to the zoo, and I've had some fairly intimate exchanges with great apes. There is consciousness behind those eyes, and intelligence too. I can believe that one of my ancestors hugged a mother that looked somewhat like that and headed off onto the savannah and left her and the rest of the family back in the trees.
There is a hill overlooking downtown Cincinnati, the summit of which is now Bellevue Park. When they televise NFL games from here, you'll often times see a shot of the skyline from the park. I spent a lot of time there when I was younger, especially out past the safety fence, out on the cliff.
At the turn of the last century, there was an incline going up the hill and there was a place called The Bellevue House up on top. For a dime, a city dweller could beat the summer heat, travel up the funicular, and get a good meal, get a drink, and enjoy the view on the veranda. Nothing remains of the Bellevue House. However, if you dig around in the weeds on the hillside, you can still find the piers of the incline.
One day, I was sitting on my spot, contemplating this very subject. I was trying to wrap my head around the concept of the literal meaning of the Bible. It was getting the best of me, and I put my Bible down and rested. There are limestone formations throughout Cincinnati. The strata are named by the locations where they stick the most prevalent. There is one called the Bellevue strata, and it has lots of various fossils from 200 million years ago. It was on this ancient limestone I was sitting. There was a margin there, where the limestone met the sharp shale and clay, and it was on that interface my pack was sitting. I noticed something glistening.
There was a snail leaving a slime trail over the rock. He'd just come from the mud, and you could see his trail. In the space of six inches, he'd traversed a bunch of clay with not only shale, but a bunch of unfossilized snail shells that were embedded. They'd been there a long time, but not long enough to fossilized. The snail then moved over a fully fossilized version of himself, embedded in the rock on which I was sitting.
Bang! It all made sense. All of a sudden I understood God's hand in this world.
