As I said many time everyone is entitled to believe whatever they want to believe. I looked it up and found that it is not considered a matter of faith for Catholics and most mainline protestants so it is not against their faith to believe either way, but that would be not be a discussion for this post.
This is way off topic - but because it came up here I feel duty bound to post that Sydney Anglican Professors of theology (and some of history) believe in Noah - but not without some serious analysis of the type of literature. I personally know an Australian Professor of Old Testament. He thinks that there was an actual Noah and his family. But the story is told in a type of literature that is 'dressed up' in Ancient Middle Eastern Cosmology - with domes over heaven, waters over those domes, and floodgates to let the water through! Needless to say - NASA didn’t find those floodgates when they went to the moon!
Biblical cosmology - Wikipedia
Not only this - but just look at the chiastic structure! The real point of a chiastic passage is in the middle. It's like the 'meat' in the middle of a hamburger. Everything mirrors off that meat in the middle - just like a good hamburger. So the meaning? My friend Dr John Dickson interviews Professor John Walton who is one of the best known Old Testament scholars in the world. He is Professor of Old Testament in the Graduate School at Wheaton College, Illinois.
The Flood - Undeceptions Basically - the world became chaotic with all the rebellion of mankind - and is returned to the pre-creation waters over the face of the earth. But this time, God's appointed saviour and his family are there.
But reconciling all this with science? What
actually happened? The Mesopotamian religion and culture of the time was profoundly influenced by all the floods they had. So there was a big flood that wiped a lot out. The whole world? Nope - it's not a
literal passage but a
literary one. How much of Noah's story is literal and how much metaphor is not really understood - as there could be lost figurative meaning in the measurements of the ark, etc. The overall point is that whatever happens in nature, God is in control - no matter how severe the event. And here God is resetting the world and starting again with his appointed family chosen to kick things off again. Does that mean the Australian Aboriginals and Indigenous Americans and even those in Africa and Europe were all flooded as well for this passage to be 'true'? Again - that's reading it literally. This is
literary. It's dressing up a local Middle Eastern event to make a theological point. Australian Aboriginals are not the point! (But I will be voting YES to "The Voice" to Parliament in 2 weeks if anyone is curious.)
Finally, how does all this relate to climate science?
Because certain fundamentalist literal types read God's promises to Noah at the end of this literary passage
literally. They take those promises as a worldwide guarantee that nothing bad can ever happen to our crops. They miss that the whole point was God starting again with his purposes for his people, and would never repeat
this type of flood. They miss the fact that
before the end of Genesis there are a number of
horrific droughts across the whole ancient world. So God definitely did not promise that all of nature would remain in balance - just that generally speaking seedtime would not end permanently. But there must be some
intentional blindness to the climate-denying literalist - as the 7 year drought that leads to Joseph's story in Egypt even got turned into a Broadway Play!