Skeptics frequently point to the Great Flood of Genesis 6-8 as 'proof' that the bible cannot be historically reliable. "It couldn't have happened", they argue. "It doesn't make sense!"
It could have happened, and it makes perfect sense. Creation scientists studying this phenomenon have come up with answers to questions posed by skeptics, and even other scientists working on something completely different have inadvertently come across evidence that bolsters creationist's claims.
Christians attempting to conform to the world and compromise the Bible often say that Noah's Flood was probably merely a regional one. But this makes no sense. If one walked 3 miles an hour for ten hours a day, in ten days, you could walk three hundred miles, right into another valley. As the Institute for Creation Research puts it, "if it was only a regional flood that God was preparing, "Noah's Wagon" would have then been a better vehicle than a 450 foot long carefully constructed Ark." Also, the Genesis account of the Flood clearly rejects this possibility. Genesis 7:19-20 says that the water covered the highest mountain peaks of the earth by more than twenty-two feet. Genesis 7:23 says that every living thing on earth was wiped out. And the water covered the earth for 150 days. Clearly, this was not a regional flood.
More evidence for a global flood is the fact that the entire human and animal population perished. In the 1500-2500 years (depending on which time scale you use) between Adam and Noah, the human population would have exploded. With people living to be 900 years old, the population would have multiplied quickly. Using a conservative formula, it is reasonable to place that world population before the Flood at five to nine BILLION! For all these people to even fit on the earth, they had to have been spread out over the entire planet. A global flood would have been necessary to kill them all.
But if the whole world flooded, where did the water come from, and where did it go? For a possible answer as to the origin of the water, go to Genesis 1:6-8-- "And God said, 'Let there be space between the waters, to separate water from water.' And so it was. God made this space to separate the waters above from the waters below. And God called the space sky. This happened on the second day."
Creation scientists speculate that the ‘waters above’ were actually a sort of ‘vapor canopy’ that covered ancient earth. There could have been enough water in the sky to flood the entire earth. But the sky was not the only source of water. Genesis 7 tells us that ‘the underground waters burst forth’. This would add to the collapsing vapor canopy to give enough water to flood the entire earth.
Also, the high mountains that we know today were not present in pre-Flood times. Psalm 104:5-9 says “You clothed the earth with floods of water, water that covered even the mountains. At the sound of your rebuke, the water fled; at the sound of your thunder it fled away. Mountains rose and valleys sank to the levels you decreed. Then you set a firm boundary for the seas, so they would never again cover the earth.†It is possible that the violent upheaval of the earth during the Flood do to the ‘underground waters’ bursting forth would have caused enough geological instability to rapidly create mountains. Also, this may have brought about the separation of continents. If the super continent ‘Pangea’ existed before the Flood, animals could easily have come to Noah from around the world. Genesis 10:25 possibly tells of the division of the continents: “Eber had two sons. The first was named Peleg- ‘division’- for during his lifetime the people of the world were divided into different language groups and dispersed.†This refers to the Tower of Babel, but also may refer to the breaking apart of the continents.
Now that the question of where the water came from is cleared up, the next question is, where did it all go? This is actually quite simple, thanks to the work of a group of Japanese scientists at the Tokyo Institute of technology. The December 1999 edition of Discover magazine reported their incredible find. With no intention of helping creationism, they inadvertently discovered that the earth’s mantle is soaking up the world’s oceans at the rate of a billion tons of water a year! The soluble, permeable rock of the lower crust and upper mantle are soaking up the oceans like a sponge. If this trend of a billion tons of water a year has been continuing since the Flood, an amazing sum of 5 x 1012, or 5,000,000,000,000, or 5 TRILLION TONS of water have been absorbed in the last five thousand years. To put this into more understood terms, since a gallon of water weighs a couple, say four, pounds, in the last five thousand years, the earth has absorbed 5,000,000,000,000,000, or 5 QUADRILLION GALLONS of water! Of course the water from the Flood wouldn’t be here today!
More questions posed by skeptics like how all the animals fit on the Ark and how they were fed are also easily answered.
Not every species of animal was on the Ark to begin with. God brought to Noah each ‘kind’ of animal. The Biblical kind can relate loosely to the ‘family’ or ‘genus’ division in modern taxonomy. Thus, a single dog kind could be taken aboard, from which is descended the entire canus genus of today. Also, none of the fish species were brought onto the Ark, of course. As to the dinosaurs, which were also included on the Ark, several things can be pointed out.
It is probable that not as many species of dinosaur as scientists document today actually existed. One dinosaur, with two pages devoted to it in the Smithsonian Book of Dinosaurs, along with a color picture or it, a map of its habitat, and what it ate, is reconstructed from a single tooth! There are many dinosaurs today that are similar to this. Also, Noah of course didn’t need to bring a full-grown brontosaurus onto the Ark. He could have had babies, or even eggs. Dinosaurs would not have posed a problem.
The Ark itself was huge. It was 300 cubits long. A cubit is the measurement from the tips of your fingers to your elbow. By today’s standards, this would have been about 450 feet, which is still big enough for all the animals, people, and food needed with room to spare. But, because the lifespan of people was so long before the Flood, it is entirely possible that people were much, much taller. Skeletons measuring eleven feet long have been discovered. If this were the case, Noah’s cubit would be significantly longer than our cubit, making even more room for animals.
As to the question of what they ate, the answer is again simple. Many animals would have gone into hibernation and aestivation. Hibernation is generally thought by the public to be induced by cold temperatures, but it is also brought on just as much by a lack of food. High temperatures or lack of food brings about aestivation. Many of the animals on the Ark would have been in a state of unconsciousness or stupor, making them much easier to care for.
The evidence for a global flood is overwhelming. More than 250 cultures worldwide have Flood traditions that are similar to the Biblical account. This cannot be dismissed as coincidence. One famous one is the legend of Gilgamesh, who survived a great flood with his family by building a boat and filling it with animals. The Greek version of this legend is similar. Tribes around the world like the Mayans and Aborigines also have legends of a great flood.
Also supporting the Flood is geological evidence. Sedimentary rock is found all around the world, and is created by water. The last 3,000 feet of Mount Everest are made of sedimentary rock and crushed shells. Fossilized clams and other fossilized sea life have been found at the top of Mount Everest.
There is overwhelming evidence for the Flood, and the questions raised by other scientists are easily answered. The obvious conclusion: The Great Flood of Noah did happen, and was worldwide. The next step is simple too: the historical records of Genesis and the rest of the Bible are reliable and 100% accurate.
Bibliography: By Brendan Beale
http://www.freewebs.com/bibletruth/noahsflood.htm
As was an "earth centered heavens". And it was scientists who did the work to discover that it wasn't true at all, thus a spherical earth rotating a sun, . . . eventually the sun being on one lonely arm of a galaxy ~100,000 light years across, . . . then eventually being one of countless numbers of other galaxies. 
