In Search of Noah's Ark

I have read other accounts of people allegedly finding the ark from time to time. Apparently there is kind of a cult of believers that have been searching for it for a long time, some call them "arkaeologists". I'm not making this up! The Bible says that the ark came to rest on Mt. Ararat, but it doesn't say where Mt. Ararat is located. There is a Mt. Ararat in the modern country of Turkey, but some believe that mountain was just named after the Biblical one. Still, Turkey is not that far away from Mesopotamia, certainly not too far for the ark to have drifted there during the big flood. Most of the people who have claimed to have found the ark admit that all they found were some old timbers that could have come from anywhere, except that nobody lives around there, and there would have been no reason for anybody to lug those timbers way up the mountain. There has been at least one aerial photo taken of the alleged ark. It's nothing but a dark spot on the glacier, but its apparently rectangular shape suggests that it is a man made object. To my knowledge, nobody has ever found the ark twice, when they go back to the site, it seems to have vanished.

I was quoting the part about the floodgates from memory, but most of my readings of the Bible were the Revised Standard Version. I could look it up, but the wording is not that much different from what you found in the King James, so I'm going to count it "close enough". The point is that this was not just a normal rainstorm. I read someplace, I think it was Wiki, that there is geological evidence of a massive flood in Mesopotamia, probably cased by a tsunami that came roaring up the Persian Gulf, but it likely happened before people were living there. The Tigris-Euphrates river system has always been prone to periodic flooding, but nothing of Biblical proportions. Many ancient cultures have flood myths in their heritage, which some believe tends to confirm the Biblical account. About 10,000 years ago, when the earliest civilizations were beginning to form, glaciers were melting and sea levels were rising all over the world. It is unlikely that the whole world was ever totally under water at one time, but many settled areas have had at least one catastrophic flood in human memory, so the popularity of flood myths should not be surprising.

The Bible is not a scientific text book, it is a collection of stories, written by dozens of different people over several centuries. The Book of Genesis is mostly mythology, probably handed down by word of mouth for hundreds of years before any of it was written down. The Flood Myth likely originated in Mesopotamia, from whence the ancestors of the Hebrews probably came. The Mesopotamian version may be found in "The Epic of Gilgamesh", one of the most ancient texts known to modern man. The cast of characters is different, but the story line is close enough to have been the inspiration for the Biblical account. I have read "Gilgamesh" and still have the book in my possession. If you think the Bible is weird, try reading that one in your spare time.

The Canopy of Water Theory is not found in the Bible, it is the attempt of some people to make sense out of a few Biblical references that are inconsistent with what we know today. The theory itself is quite logical, and I think it's a good example of how an argument can be logical and still wrong. Well, I don't know for an absolute fact that it's wrong, so let's just call it bloody unlikely.