Did God really destroy the entire world with a catastrophic flood in Noah’s time?

Can you imagine, the creation that once gave honour to God the creator had now become so evil and turned their backs on the One who gave them life. So great was the evil that angels had taken human women for wives and they bore children which the Bible claims were giants. Sin and evil had become such a way of life for humankind that that’s all they thought about: Genesis 6:5 “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

God made the decision to destroy mankind along with all the animals on the earth at that time (this included the dinosaurs which had existed alongside humans until that time). But not wanting to annihilate the entire creation, God would preserve life in the form of Noah and the Ark. Noah was the only righteous person alive. He, along with his three sons, still worshiped and gave honour to God. God instructed Noah to construct a massive ship (Ark) in which both animals and people (Noah and his family: eight people) would be saved from the catastrophic global flood which would soon come. This might be a fantastical story to believe but we must take the Bible literally if we are to believe it at all. When we believe the account of the flood we are in a better position to understand the evidences we see today.

The massive oil and coal reserves found today are a direct result of the compacted vegetation as a result of the flood. In fact there have been discoveries of human artefacts entombed in coal, proving that the formation of coal is a relatively short process, not one that takes millions of years.

The sudden burying of animals which preserved them as fossils are the direct result of the flood. All around the world there is abundant evidence of millions of animals (fossils) that were buried rapidly in mud and sand just as one would expect from a global flood. The evidence can also be seen in the rock stratia which were laid down quickly, one after the other, without significant time breaks in between. The radical deformation of thick layers of sediment without evidence of cracking or melting also shows how all the layers must have still been soft when they were bent. The world-wide distribution of many geological features and rock types is also consistent with a global flood. The Morrison Formation is a layer of sedimentary rock that extends from Texas to Canada, clearly showing the fallacy of the belief that ‘the present is the key to the past’ – there are no processes on earth today that are laying down such large areas of sedimentary layers. In reality, understanding Gods revelation about the past is the key to understanding the present.

Some also argue that all the different animal species could not have fitted into the ark as the Bible claims. They fail to realise that not every single species was present but rather ‘two of every kind’. For instance, there would not have been two German Shepherds, two Bulldogs, two Rottweilers, two Poodles, two Husky’s, et al. Rather there would have been two dogs, from which all the other breeds would develop over the next few thousand years after the flood. Also God could have provided young or adolescent animals to enter the ark which would have required less food and space.

Some would also argue that a wooden ship the size of the Ark would not have been able to ‘sail’ on the waters without propulsion or rudder systems like our ocean liners of today. Well again they over-complicate the matter. The Ark simply needed to drift, to stay afloat. It didn’t need to be propelled in any given direction. To keep it adjacent to the wave patterns and stable in the swells it would have been fitted out with anchor stones. Evidence of such stones have been discovered in Turkey near the mountain of Ararat. In fact some Biblical historians believe they have actually found the remains of Noah’s Ark. The Bible tells us that when the waters began to subside the Ark eventually came to rest in the mountains of Ararat. Genesis 8:3 “And the waters returned from off the earth continually and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated. And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.” This is the exact location of the remains discovered in the region in modern day Turkey. Not only can the collapsed outline of the ship be clearly seen (which is the exact dimension mentioned in the Bible) but geological scans of the site reveal a man-made structure with right-angles and support beams consistent with a ship. Nearby are dozens of huge stones with holes bored through – these are believed to be the anchor stones that were fitted to the ark.