[dartuser]

"No, but I think Christians who are not open to the suggestion that Noah's Flood is an allegory have a challenge in defending it as a literal account."

The creation science movement has been quite successful defending this since the time of Darwin.

"Christians believe in many other things in the bible as being symbolic or allegorical, but quite a few insist that the story of Noah must be entirely fact."

Very true, but only where the text is obviously meant to be taken symbolically ... we can read parts of Revelation and we see the imagery, language, and genre as one that obviously requires applying a different eye. But the account in Genesis uses plain language that doesn't require allegorical interpretation. It describes simple events that are understood plainly. If it reads plainly, why try to make it say something that is not plain.

Im curious, what evidence did you come across to make you give up your literal interpretation of the flood?

[Dinsdale]

The creation science movement has been quite successful defending this since the time of Darwin.

You tell funny joke!

Creation science continues to twist and turn in order to avoid the data outside the bible.

[Dog Gone]

Geology, with emphasis on depositional environments. The fossil record just doesn't support a mass burial of all land animals outside of the ark in a single event. If we had a fossil bed containing dinosaurs, dogs, monkeys, and humans all mixed together, then we'd know they all died in one event. But we don't.

Then there are the common sense problems with letting out all the animals at Ararat I mentioned earlier. Or the water volume problem. Or the what the heck would people and animals eat except each other when they disembarked problem.

Rather than straining to come up with bizarre explanations for all these problems, I came to the conclusion that it was an allegory.