If it ever happened, which is unlikely, it was purely an accident, and the whale did NOT do it to save the man.
If it did happen, the man was saved. The whales intentions will always be unknown, but someone can interpret them as having been to save the man.

No, I don't assume anything. Nowhere in the bible does it say that that Genesis was a metaphor.
can snakes talk? of course not. could it have been a metaphor that actually teaches people that their brain has the power to make them think that snakes talk? yes. i am a person who has the ability to reason and i do not differ physically from the person who wrote genesis. i have the ability to explain hard-to-grasp things using complex forms of imagery and metaphor, but i first have to accept that someone will not take me for an idiot. if you actually think that someone wrote "and the snake spoke..." because they were trying to say that "snakes can talk" then you are a very shallow thinker.

Modern science is quite different from the ravings of the ignorant, naked, half-starved, savages that were responsible for the myths of the Old Testament.
yes indeed modern science is quite different, but i just told you a way that modern science can prove exactly what was written in the bible that you call false. please read it again and re-evaluate it. the "ignorant, naked, half-starved savages" that you speak of are the same ones that built the pyramids, invented wine, came up with the mathematical concept of zero, and wrote the bible. if you were to open your mind for a whole three seconds and IMAGINE that those people were ACTUALLY SMART and that they were trying to TELL YOU SOMETHING you would have something to GAIN from their writing, especially if you were one of them. the old testament was something that almost brought together every single person at one time in the earth's history. it almost made everyone think for a split second that perhaps its true and perhaps we are all the same. imagine the possibilities that would be realized if everyone on earth TODAY were to UNITE.

There are thousands of absurd things in life that people could claim have merit, and we must judge that some of them are so stupid as to be worthless. The superstitious claims of the bible fall into this category. They are not worth the time and effort that it would take to disprove them - because it's already been done.
everything that someone experiences in life has merit because something can be learned from every situation in someone's life. the problem is that people are so ignorant that they choose ignorance.

unless something has been proven mathematically people still have the ability to imagine the possibilities.

cheers