I was walking past the University Museum this morning when I saw that they were setting up for (or maybe tearing down after) some kind of festival. The Museum is famous for having been in the 19th Century the location for an early debate on Darwin's Origin of Species, between T.E. Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. As I recall, Huxley convincingly won the day. It is, rather self-consciously, a cathedral of science, and a humanist icon.
So I was a little perturbed to see as part of whatever was going on on the lawn outside seemed to include something looking suspisciously like an ark. My first reaction was to think "don't go there": surely this will get the nutters all excitable.
But on reflection, that seems far too defeatist. The story of Noah and the Ark plainly isn't about global geomorphology of 5000 years ago; it plainly isn't a treatise on practical biodiversity. We can benefit from it without taking those perspectives. Surely it's a story of wickedness and faithfulness; a story of redemption; a story of care for creation; a story of hope. It does belong to those of a rationalist disposition (as well as to those who believe that however many gigatonnes of water came into being briefly for a year, and then vanished again leaving little or no trace behind them).
I think that since I decided that the global cataclysm wasn't a matter of 'fact', I've been scared of to think of it at all: I'm a bit of a literalist at heart, still. But as a tale to teach us, it has a lot to say, and we mustn't shy away from that.
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