The Flood of Noah

We all know the story of Noah and the Ark which has largely been relegated to being a children’s story so I am not really going into that part here. In my book The Creation Puzzle Solved I had a chapter of the same name. In it I stated that we can not always understand the Bible exactly right until God is ready for us to. I stand by that statement. There were several scenarios given that might or might not be true but all could possibly be a solution or part of a solution that explains the Genesis account (Some copies of the book are still available).
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The flood is an issue that troubles even Christians but more important young people who are exposed to science education which seeks to destroy the Biblical account make this a relevant issue. Christians in general have done a bad job of making this story acceptable to young minds. This article is intended to be an addendum to that book.
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Many Christians seem to lean toward a young earth explanation of scriptures but I am not one of those who do. The young earth scenario requires an assumption that God created the earth to appear to be old, thus fooling scientists into accepting evolution as the only viable solution to what we observe. One of my hobbies is scuba diving and a few years ago I had the privilege of diving in what is known as the Blue Hole which was discovered by Jacques Cousteau south of Belize. It’s over 500 feet deep but when you reach 120 feet you realize that you have entered an underwater cavern complete with stalactites and stalagmites. These beautiful and huge formations take tens of thousands of years to form but they can’t form at all under water. Why would God make something like that appear as if it formed hundreds of thousands of years ago then sunk below the Caribbean sea? Numbers 23:19 says that “God is not (like) a man that he should lie:" I do not believe that God has any need to fool man into believing that the earth is any older than it is. The age of the earth is whatever it is but probably several billion years old.
Many Bible scholars would assume wrongly at this point that I am an evolutionist but that is for another story.
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The flood
Genesis 7:19 “And the water prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.”

This verse in the absence of geological evidence is one thing that scientists use to try to refute the scriptures and in all honestly it has bothered me too for years. I believe that if any person struggles to understand difficult scripture, and they pray for understanding, God will in his own good time answer that prayer at least to the satisfaction of that person. In fact, what I am about to explain may be the answer to some of your prayers.
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In the mind of science, In order for water to cover all of the high places it had to come from somewhere and afterward it had to go somewhere and it had to leave evidence. To cover the world, as we know it, that would take water over five miles above sea level. That is considerably more water than what we appear to have. Sure there is water in our atmosphere but not near that much.
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The problem here, to use a cliche, is that we are not able to think out of our box and we miss even the obvious. I was reading a book written by a "young earth theologian" as I often do to learn how they think and an answer came to me from out of the blue, to use another cliche. An answer to prayer is what it really was.
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The Bible does not distinguish between the states of water: gas, liquid or solid. The flood was the beginning of the only Biblical mention of a climate change. We are told that it had not yet rained on the earth. Can you Imagine a volcano so large that ash goes into the atmosphere and completely encircles the earth? The dust in this dark cloud seeds the water vapor in the atmosphere and causes it to rain exceedingly. There is another effect as well, the Sun is blocked out to the point that the temperature in all of the high places and the extreme north and south drops and freezes the rain so that all of the earth is indeed covered with water or ice.
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Science attests to the fact of such a volcano http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/volcano-tours/volcanoes/indonesia/sumatra/toba/
and science attests to the extinction of animals such as the mammoth, giant sloth and the saber tooth tiger. Noah must have saved smaller varieties of these species as we still have them today but the truth is that tropical animals like those mentioned above can still be found frozen whole in Siberia. http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/fit/chapter1.asp Science also agrees that catastrophic local floods have surely happened in the past which would have been the condition where Noah was. http://www.sentex.net/~tcc/cfdb.html So now you can see that the Bible and science can be brought to a common agreement on at least this point.
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I am convinced that all the other objections that science has can be explained as well and it is probable that the expeditions searching for the ancient ark are looking at too high of an altitude. See this amazing almost half size replica of Noah's Ark. http://www.pbase.com/paulthedane/noahs_ark
And http://www.arkvannoach.com/language/en/
Jimmy Huffman