For as far back as our ancestors were able, perhaps hundreds of thousand years back to our origins in Africa, human life has looked up at the stars, looked around at the world and at life itself, and wondered how it all happened, where it all came from. We don’t know when this kind of reflection really began, but long before there were written records, people told stories about the beginning of the world emerging from chaos or water or mud, hatched from an egg or birthed by gods, created from nothing or created and destroyed in an endless cycle. They told stories about the forces of nature that ruled their lives, from life-giving sun and rain to horrible, frightening disasters. They told stories about their ancestors, and found in those stories a sense of identity and pride.

As time went on, some of these stories were written down, and some have been preserved to this day. Through the twists and turns of history, our culture inherited the stories of a Middle Eastern tribe, which now have special standing in their present form in the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Scriptures. These are some of the oldest stories in the Bible, telling of the creation of the world in six days, the almost total destruction of the world in a great flood, and the mythologized history of ancient Israel, woven by storytelling with elements of genuine history, preserving the echoes of voices and lives from millennia past.

It is difficult to disentangle the strands of history in the Bible from the purely imaginative tales and the stories that turn even real people who lived into mythical heroes and villains. It wouldn’t matter to most of us–at least those of us who are not professional historians–but we have reason to care because a large group of our fellow citizens read these stories as if they were ALL history, as if every word were describing events that really happened, exactly as written.

Now, please keep in mind that it is not necessary to be a Biblical literalist in order to be a Christian. Vast numbers of Christians understand that the stories in the Bible are often just stories, told out of human imagination or told to make a point, with lessons to teach us, perhaps, but which cannot be treated as literal accounts of history without doing violence to reason and violence to the Bible itself. There are many Christian allies in the human search for truth who use the Bible as a starting point in their quest but who are open to the insights of other religions and of science. This includes an openness to the rapid learnings of science in cosmology, geology and evolution, much of which has been discovered only in the last century and a half. Evolution is the story of the development of life that is written not in human books but in the earth itself. Many of the pages of this book are hidden from us, and some may always be, but new pages are discovered every year, in DNA tests that confirm or refine what fossils have told us, in feathered dinosaurs that reveal the origins of birds, and in discoveries of extinct branches of the human family tree. Multiple branches of science and different methods of dating the earth confirm each other, and new ideas such as emergent properties in chaos and complexity theory have implications for both mathematics and for how we understand nature.

Unfortunately, there is considerable resistance to these advances in understanding among many people and religious groups in the United States, especially among many who call themselves Christian. The level of disbelief in evolution in this nation is shocking. A 2006 CBS poll found that 55% of Americans believed that God created humans in their present form. Only 13% believed that human life evolved without guidance from God. A Gallup poll the same year found 46% of Americans believed God created human life in its present form within the last 10,000 years, and again only 13% believed human life evolved without divine intervention. Another 2006 study of 34 western nations including the U.S., Japan, and most of Europe found that when asked if human beings developed from earlier species of animals, only in the United States and Turkey did more people say no than yes.

Openness to evolution is somewhat higher in surveys that don’t mention God or human life, but still nearly half of all Americans reject evolution completely. Most of these surveys don’t ask directly about young-earth creationism–the belief that not only human life but the whole world was created just a few thousand years ago–but young earth creationism is alive and well in American society, generally among the same 25 to 40 percent of Americans who believe in Armageddon and the Rapture. Just a year ago, a slick 27 million dollar Creation Museum opened in Kentucky just a few miles from Cincinnati, selling the idea that vegetarian T-Rexes lived at the same time as humans just six thousand years ago. It would be funny if it were not believed by about 500 times as many people in this country as there are Unitarian Universalists. Funded entirely by private donations, the Creation Museum had over 400,000 visitors in its first year, and they are expanding with a playground and more exhibits for children.

But what about the all the evidence for evolution in paleontology, biology, physics and geology? At least in response to fossils and the geological record, the linchpin of young-earth creationism is the Biblical story of the Great Flood. It’s a story many of us grew up with; I remember going to summer camp and singing, “The Lord said to Noah, there’s going to be a floody, floody!” (I’m sure some of you sang it, too!)

The story of Noah and the ark takes up most of four chapters in the first book of the Bible, Genesis 6-9. It really consists of two versions of the story, just as there are two creation stories in Genesis, only with the flood they are woven together into a single narrative, which is why the story sounds jerky and repetitive in places. What you heard a few minutes ago was a shortened version of what Biblical scholars call the Priestly version of the story. The other story, or Yahwist version, is the one where the “clean” animals come in by seven pairs, the flood lasted for only 40 days instead of more than a year, and birds were sent out to find evidence of dry land. Both versions probably evolved from earlier stories such as the remarkably similar flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Atrahasis Epic, written hundreds of year earlier.

According to the young-earth creationists, it was the Great Flood that deposited the bones of millions of animals killed in the flood, creating the fossils we see today. It was the flood that laid down the geological layers that circle the earth and then carved through those same layers as the waters receded to form the Grand Canyon. There are variations on these themes–it’s hard to pin creationists down on exactly how they think this worked–but the flood story is a frequent fall-back to explain the world we see around us.

Of course, the notion of a literal global flood less than six thousand years ago is utter folly. I could spend the rest of the day going on about the absurdities of a literal interpretation of the Great Flood, but you will be glad to know that I don’t plan to do that. Instead, I’ll only go on for a few minutes. A few examples and questions are enough to illustrate the full absurdity of the global flood story, so I ask your patience here.

Just imagine for a moment that the Biblical flood story were really true. There can be little doubt that it would have to be a fully global flood, because the story is clear that it covered all the high mountains. It couldn’t have been a local flood, both because nothing in the story suggests that, and there would be nothing to hold in water deep enough to cover high mountains–it would quickly drain toward the ocean. But to cover the highest mountains on earth would require nearly a billion cubic miles of new water, about triple all the water on earth now. Even if the mountains were much lower then, as some creationists claim, it would still take massive quantities of water to cover them. Where did it all come from and where did it go? The best the creationists can do is to propose a rapid and massive reshaping of the earth just after the flood, with no apparent cause and no evidence either for the catastrophes or for the enormous water flow required.

This only scratches the surface of the problems with a literal flood story. All the pairs of animals on the ark had to get there from far around the earth, surviving in all the environments they had to cross to get there (never mind how they knew to come). After the flood, they had to go back on a devastated earth, perhaps an earth undergoing huge cataclysms, and somehow repopulate their environments, rapidly evolving into the many species variants we see today despite lacking genetic diversity. (It’s ironic that some creationists think this amount of evolution could occur in 5,000 years while denying evolution over billions of years.)

It wouldn’t have been much better while the animals were on the ark–there had to be tens of thousands of different animals even by the very low estimates of the creationists. For over a year, they all had to be kept alive in a wooden boat 450 feet long that would have leaked horribly and smelled worse. Eight people had to feed all these animals, many with distinctive diets (never mind where all the food came from). The carnivores had to be kept from eating the other animals. Noah’s family also had to care for sick animals and dispose of all the animal waste, probably tons of manure a day. Not fun. At least the fish wouldn’t have to be on board, but then again, it’s not clear how fresh-water and salt-water fish would have survived together in the flood.

During and after the flood, all the sediments in the oceans and the bodies of dead animals, from trilobites to dinosaurs, would have to be distributed, sorted perfectly and quickly hardened to lay down the geologic layers and fossils we see today. It’s not clear how all those animals could have been alive at the same time before the flood, but never mind that, either. Even minerals would have to be sorted perfectly to give the appearance of radiological decay over time. No non-miraculous water mechanics could ever have performed this perfect sorting.

There are countless other problems with a literal flood story, from how dinosaur footprints got onto sediment layers as they were deposited under water, to why 40,000 years of ice core records, almost 10,000 years of overlapping tree ring records and over 5,000 years of historical records in Egypt show no indications of the flood. Chalk, limestone, sandstone, salt formations, ancient coral reefs and millions of annual sediment layers in the Green River formation in Wyoming pose other problems for creationists. If you really want to dive into all the issues, I’d suggest you start with the website www.talkorigins.org. The information and links are very thorough. I’ll warn you, though, that you aren’t likely to convince many creationists through rational arguments. That’s not how most of them got there, and the reasons people stay there have little to do with detailed scientific arguments. For many people who believe in creationism, what is at stake includes their family and church relationships, their confidence in the Bible, and everything the Bible represents to them, from the promise of everlasting life to the daily protection of a loving God. Since it seems superficially implausible that life in all its complexity could have developed without help from a God (never mind the question of how such a God would just happen to exist), it is easy for such people to reject evolution and consider it no further.

A place like the Creation Museum doesn’t really present solid evidence for a young earth or a creationist past, but it does provide reassurance to those who have other reasons to believe in creationism and reject evolution. The exhibits generally don’t claim to offer definite answers, because their purpose is mainly to raise doubts about evolutionary science. This superficial open-mindedness is actually undergirded by rigid Biblical belief, while the seeming self-certainty of evolutionary science is actually undergirded by the constant process of scientific questioning and investigation. There are creationist books and websites filled with talking points, speculation and ad-hoc assertions, much of it sincere, but there is no coherent creationist theory that could be tested in nature about the process and effects of creation or the flood. Ultimately, the only way out for creationists is an endless series of miracles and a hoaxter God who makes the world look like it evolved when it really didn’t.

But most creationists avoid all this. Instead, they search for anomalies or gaps in standard scientific theories and make suggestive arguments, as in a recent movie that tries to blame the holocaust on belief in evolution. The credentials of a handful of creationist scientists are highly touted while the overwhelming majority of scientists and the conclusions of peer-reviewed journals are dismissed as simply biased. It’s not that science is never wrong, but it has mechanisms for self-correction over time, which creationism does not. Even Intelligent Design, a dressed-up version of creationism, presents no testable hypotheses. It would be fine to discuss in comparative religion classes, which I wish there were more of, but it is useless in a science class. Even its core notion of irreducible complexity is demonstrably false. Just imagine, for example, a pile of rocks falling on a hill of dirt, such that when the dirt washes away, a natural stone arch is left behind. If you take any one rock out, it may fall, so it is irreducibly complex, but that doesn’t mean it had to have an intelligent designer. That’s only one of many arguments exposing the emptiness of Intelligent Design.

So why should we care about all this? I have no desire to go out and change peoples beliefs and estrange them from their families. The best we can do at a personal level is to be truthful and loving and hope that occasionally something will break through. But in the public arena, we must be vigilant. It matters if religious beliefs feed in to war or to a lack of care for our planet, on the grounds that it’s all in God’s hands and it’s coming to an end soon anyway. It matters that our children have good science education. There is a new effort underway to teach “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution as a theory, which may sound innocent enough, but it is just another guise to slip creationist ideas into science classes. The Texas Board of Education, which has more control over textbooks than any other body in the nation, now has seven creationists among its fifteen members, one person away from a creationist majority. School board elections matter! Last year, the powerful chair of the Texas House Appropriations Committee distributed an anti-Semitic anti-evolution memo to other legislators that originated with a Georgia legislator, referring the reader to fixedearth.com, a website arguing that the sun really goes around the earth. It’s not a spoof; it shows the extremes to which Biblical literalism can go. Take a look yourself if you want a laugh or a scare.

Besides political and educational reasons, there are other reasons we should care. Biblical literalism robs us of the Bible as a source of stories, including the story of the flood. Take a look at the story again–it has some lessons to teach us if we don’t try to turn it into ridiculous science or history.

First of all, the story illustrates human creativity in trying to understand our world. Why are there rainbows? Why are there floods? We may understand those things better now, but there will always be mystery in the universe, with room for stories and room to learn. It is certainly possible to believe in God and evolution at the same time; many people do. Evolution is not about shutting down religion or shutting down imagination; it is about learning to read with wonder the book of life that is spread before us in the earth.

In the story, the hero Noah is willing to act for the good of life on this planet, even if no one else does. What an example of commitment! Even though God is the primary actor in the flood, the story teaches that it is our own responsibility as human beings to do the work of saving the earth. Today, even some evangelical Christians are beginning to warm to the idea of environmental responsibility.

The flood story has another lesson for us, too. The whole story is about the attempt of God to eliminate wickedness from the world by destroying the evildoers. It didn’t work. It never does. It was the ultimate folly of the Flood. If God can promise in the story never to try this again, with the rainbow as a symbol, we ought to remember ourselves the futility of getting rid of ideas or behaviors we don’t like by trying to destroy the people in whom we find them. That goes for people of different religious beliefs, different cultures, different sexual orientations, the rich and the poor, and even young-earth creationists. We all share one planet, and we need to find a way to live together here. The journey of human life has come a long way on this planet, and I hope it still has a long way to go.

May it be so.