(September 21, 2021 at 10:47 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: In the region of half of American take the Noah's Ark story literally (it was around 60% in 2004, so progress). But let's pretend it's a fringe belief that skeptics shouldn't even bother to address, else they'll be considered to be trolling.
The 2004 poll:
https://abcnews.go.com/images/pdf/947a1V...eBible.pdf
It's just not very interesting to shut down because it IS so ridiculous, and it has some disturbing things to say about the character of God. It's one of those things where if I engage with a theist on it and we can't even get past "This story proves that your god is an immoral tyrant because drowning everyone is how he deals with disobedience; he'd rather everyone be dead and start the earth project over than allow people to have their agency and disobey him." if they're defending the story as an example of god being just and good to his creations, his children, then the "proof" parts of shutting the story down are not really going to matter. It's a story believed not because the believers are really good skeptics with a mind for scientific thinking; it's emotion.