I love talking about the flood. Some people (many theologians included) choose to take the whole story of Noah’s ark as allegory.
But there is a lot of evidence for a global flood. Nearly every civilization has a great flood story, with many of the basic details matching up.
There was a mass extinction event sometime between 4000-10000 years ago. Many scientists call it our most recent ice age, but there are others who feel that the evidence points more towards a flood than a standard ice age. Woolly Mammoths, Saber Tooth cats, and many other species found flash-frozen with food still in their mouths. A typical ice age struggles to explain how that happened, but the rapid cooling caused by a deluge upon a planet that pretty much had a greenhouse-tropical environment prior to the extinction event would.
Along with the last ice age/great flood, were massive seismic events. Mountains grew rapidly in height, and the ocean trenches sunk deeper. If you smoothed out the topology of the earth just a little bit, to the way it might’ve looked prior to that event, the entire globe would be covered in water.
Noah’s ark itself was a miracle. Whether it all happened exactly as in the Bible account, or God found another (perhaps harder to describe in ancient times) way to preserve life through the last extinction event, is open to interpretation. But I feel it’s not that far fetched to believe it happened more or less as recorded in the Bible.
Much of the diversity in species and breeds has developed over the last several thousand years. The thousands of species of dogs, wolves, etc can be traced back to a common lineage of wolves around 3-4000 years ago.
The same is true of a lot of different animal species. There would not have been millions of animals on the ark. And God allowed some of the diversity in species that had been present, to go extinct. Which would be easier to have on the ark, a Woolly Mammoth, or a regular Elephant? A tiger, or a saber tooth cat?
On a side thought, I just wanted to point out that not all Christians believe in a “young earth”. The biblical and scientific evidence points to the fact that the “creative days” were figurative, and define epochs of creative acts. And depending on how you read the genesis account, the creative ‘days’ do not even begin until after God first created the heavens and the earth.
Interestingly, the general scientific view agrees with the sequence in Genesis in which the various species appeared. How an ancient bible writer got the sequence right, when many other creation legends of that period were sideways and upside down so to speak, is quite an interesting question.
