Re: More fake news
"Simple; it was a category error to involve the Bible but at the time it was not recognised by many people in the West that Torah was not a science textbook."
Really? Back in the 5th C, Augustine of Hippo, that eminent Church Father held that when a literal interpretation contradicts science and our God-given reason, the Biblical text must be interpreted metaphorically. While Scripture has a literal sense, this "literal sense" does not always mean that the Scriptures are mere history; at times they are rather an extended metaphor. [
De Genesi ad literam 1:19–20, Chapt. 19 [408],
De Genesi ad literam, 2:9].
I think you will find that this has been Official Church Doctrine for more than 1500 years. The concept of biblical literalism is a modern conceit.
"To confuse science with history of science is also a category error."
I think we can level this accusation at the Uniformitarians. They insisted that because Noah's Flood was a story in the Bible, therefore there could never have been such catastrophes in the past. This somewhat bizarre belief led to J Harlen Bretz's work on the
Spokane Floods* being dismissed by the establishment when he first published in 1923. He wasn't vindicated until he was awarded the Penrose Medal (the Geological Society of America's highest award) in 1979, at the age of 96. He told his son: "All my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over."
* JT Pardee assisted Bretz in his research, but his employer (USGS) forbade him publicly supporting Bretz's theory. Pardee estimated that flood waters in excess of 45 miles per hour were required to roll the largest of the boulders moved by the Spokane Flood. The water flow was nine cubic miles per hour, more than the combined flow of every river in the world. Current estimates place the flow at ten times the flow of all current rivers combined.