Well, you've hit two primary points that are in serious controversy in the arena of thinkers today.
1) The creation account.
2) Noah's ark.
For both of them, in practice, I'd suggest that you simply understand that there's a lot of controversy but that neither of them are altogether serious when it comes to what the foundations of faith should rest on.
Now, on to the nitty gritty mess. To begin with, you have to understand a few key points [I'll address the creation account first]. First of all, you need to understand that God created everything that exists, from your ability to read this sentence, to the materials the computer you're reading it on is made from, to the table that the computer is sitting on, to the city you live in, etc..etc... ad nauseam. It's all God's creation - He made it, we utilize it and claim our logic and our designs belong to us - but we, ourselves, belong to God by circumstance of being part of creation. This being said, we can now move on to point two.
This [point 1] is what the creation account is, essentially. The understanding and expression that everything in this world belongs to God as He created it; science is a very unstable foundation to place any understanding of reality as it's continually evolving and shifting, as has been human philosophy for the entire history of both. One of the biggest myths that our generation has been taught is that we're isolated in an isolated world, and that we belong to ourselves. This becomes a huge issue because this is essentially what science presents us when it talks about nature and the world.
Now, with this perspective, let's look at Genesis. The creation account states that God made everything in seven days. The first day;
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
Obviously, if we're going to take what we currently know about science as absolute and unchanging fact, this presents a problem for any observer. It's problematic because it states the Earth existed before the sun, and that the Earth was entirely covered in water. This also relies on a huge amount of assumptions. First of all, we have to presume that this form of an account isn't possible in nature as we know it. Of course, no amount of human understanding will ever be able to substantiate what actually occured in the creation account as it's stated in such a way that it's hard to determine exactly what is transpiring; the people writing this had no understanding of modern science, so it wasn't presented in a scientific way. This is basically how all of it (still on the 1st and 2nd chapters of Genesis) is, including the creation of biologic life, the creation of botanic life, the creation of human life, etc... The absolutely critical question is whether or not it's important for the Earth to be incredibly old, or incredibly young. I don't know about you, but if science can absolutely demonstrate [which, mind you, would be a first in science as we know it] that the Earth is some billions of years old, it's not going to hurt my faith one iota. God is still God, Jesus still died for our sins and was resurrected on the third day, the early Church still existed beyond overwhelming odds that it'd have vanished if Jesus was mythological, and Christianity still exists today as the most sensible solution to the problem of existence. I hope this is a sufficient explanation, as I absolutely abhore getting into creationism vs. evolution, etc..etc.. debates. It drives me nuts.
This is what's important:
Link. The later half of Genesis 2 is also quite important as it details
why God created the world and mankind the way He did. That's what, essentially, you should take the creation account to be; an explanation of
why and
what form but not a serious explanation of
how, although it really doesn't matter one way or the other. It's usually better to simply take it with a grain of salt - it's better for your faith if you don't feel it's constantly being challenged by science, you have to understand what science is; our interpretation of what God created - with God taken out of the picture.
Continued on next post... [EDIT: When I have time, I'm at school right now (
) and the next post will probably require a bit of research to pull up the information required - Have patience!
].
A few too many big words there 
