>The only thing I can think of is a slippery-slope problem.
Exactty. I was going to post about it, but you said it first.
I agree that such lame attempts to reconcile a literal account of the mabul (as described in the Torah) with science will ultimately backfire among folks that think more critically, leading them on a no-turning back road named Skepticism. If such proponents of these childish approaches to both Torah and science remain the dominant voice, perhaps Orthodoxy will eventually consist only of fideists that ultimately distrust science and scientists as atheistic enemies of Torah.
> If anyone else has any thought on why otherwise serious people take these positions, leave a comment.
Yes. It's more than just slippery slope. These people have grown up their whole lives believing there was a man called Noach with a boat full of animals. It's part of their being. Such beliefs are not easily shaken.
Not even for a biologist with a PhD from NYU?
I thought that YU valued Torah and science, so why are they trashing science in favor of Torah?
Couldn't we read the verses to really mean that Noach dreamed this? Isn't there one odd spelling in one word in the story? Isn't there one word translated incorrectly? Perhaps the earlier commentators never mentioned that Noach only dreamed this because it was such an obvious fact?
Seems like they are not as devoted to rational thinking as they claim to be. I'm disappointed in them.
Ah, the It Was All A Dream out. I think they tried that on Dallas. And at the end of the second Bob Newhart show. Perhaps Noah woke up and found he was actually married to Suzanne Pleshette. The Flood, like the 10 Plagues, is a magnet for people who want to naturalize the event to prove that it actually happened.
I still think you are missing the bigger issue here, which is that our conception of what "every animal" means, and what the Torah's conception of what the story means, may in fact be a cause for our confusion and shouldn't be dismissed as some sort of lame kvetch.
If one could figure out exactly how a "min" was classified, it could be enlightening.
But the idea that there was rapid evolution from just a few species in 2300 BCE is pretty farfetched.
I think people on both sides of this fence should read some of Aryeh Kaplan's books. He reconciled, INTELLIGENTLY, many of the issues brought up, including the world being 15 billion years old, man existing before Adam, etc and does it with a full eye on the Torah and Science.
If he took two of each *species* he would have needed a nuclear aircraft carrier or two. What most people think is a species is actually a broader category of family. Deer isn't a species -- it enncompasses around 40 species. Dogs and wolves have around 36 species.
"OK, it's time to bring in the wasps!"
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