Since one poster here likes to bring up integrity a lot, I thought I would issue a challenge based on it.
Here's my challenge:
If you were offered one million dollars to find evidence of Noah's flood, would you:
A) Take it and go look somewhere?
B) Decline it on the basis that you are convinced scientifically that Noah's flood didn't occur?
I don’t think one million dollars would be enough for such a project. For a proper expeditiion, I think one would need at least twenty million dollars, for equipment, for chartering an aircraft, and so on. There is also the not inconsiderable problem of access to Mount Ararat being highly restricted by Turkey, as part of their military presence to keep the Armenians, who are the rightful owners of the mountain, from attempting to reclaim it, despite the genocide which they waged against them. They were able to get away with this during the Cold War because unfortunately for the Armenians, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed them in the 1920s, and thus the Soviet frontier ran very close to Mount Ararat.
Now, in the past, corrupt officials might have provided access to Mount Ararat, but this is no longer an option, for Americans at least, because the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prohibits Americans from bribing officials abroad, and is even less of an option if we are talking about ethics and integrity. So ultimately everything is contingent on persuading Turkey to allow access.
I myself think the wood of the ark would have decomposed by now, or be buried under material which if disturbed could cause a landslide and much havoc, and so such an expedition is not worth it; we can assert that a flood happened since the prevailing trend is for both the mythological history and the religions of the region to record an epic deluge, which reinforces the scriptural claims concerning the Flood, although conversely, we also know that a flood could not have covered the entire planet, but in referring to the world, the Bible could well have been referring to the region in which Noah lived, which was, to all extents and purposes, his world, since other areas were effectively inaccessible to him. Just as the universe is for us limited to the observable universe; we cannot see beyond our past lightcone or hope to travel beyond the edge of our potential future lightcone, measured by the speed of light. But if you gave me twenty million, I would try to find evidence of the Ark, although even then I am not sure that would be enough money, and that would come with the caveat that the Turks could shut the entire project down before it even started.
I don’t see what’s wrong with accepting the ark as an article of faith. Furthermore, the main value of the ark in Scripture is its typological-prophetic role: the Ark is a type of the Church, which is the Ship of Salvation, and also of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in that it carried the future of mankind in its hull, just as she carried in her womb the future of mankind in the person of the Son of Man, our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ. So while I do not deny the Genesis narrative, I think, based on the ending of Luke, that we must regard it as an historical event which pointed to the future incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
