It always baffles me that otherwise intelligent people can twist logic so much in order to fit biblical stories into some pseudo-scientific worldview when in fact that Bible itself does not even pretend that those stories are supposed to be literal truths. The redactors of the Bible (a bit less than 3,000 years ago) who put together the stories of creation, Noah's ark, etc., knew damn well that the stories are not literal history. They had no problem putting two distinct creation stories right next to one another - because they were not concerned with giving us a historical account of the creation of the world. The original tellers of Noah's story, and of the creation stories for that matter (the authors J and P, respectively), had no problem borrowing elements from the Enuma Elish, the story of Atrahasis, the story of Adapa and the South Wind, etc., in order to make their own (monotheistic) point. All those stories are basically monotheistic polemics in a polytheistic world, borrowing stories and motifs from that time in order to present a different view on the relationship between humanity and the divine, and a different view of the divine altogether, the concept of one invisible and moral deity. Why this modern need to reduce these beautiful, poetic stories to mere history (and the need to then twist all logic in order to make them fit into the mold of mere history)? Silly. The Bronze age writers of the Hebrew Bible were a heck of a lot smarter than these modern creationists! Bottomline is that these stories do not conflict with science because they have nothing to do with science. They do not aim at providing a scientific account of the origins of the world, or a historical account of a great flood that nearly destroyed the world. Their aim is neither science nor history.
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