Explaining Noah's Ark to Atheists...with Algebra

In Algebra, X can be anything. A house, a car, a duck, a nation, or a person. All you need to do is define it and you can use it for anything.

In the story of Noah's Ark, X is someone living their best life. They’re being a positive force in their world and their community. They're doing what God desires and loving their neighbor as themselves.

But in Genesis 6:5, we we find out that the vast majority of people were not, in fact, living their best life. They were doing the exact opposite.
“And now God found that Earth was full of men’s iniquities, so that the whole frame of their thought was continually set on evil”

And there were so many of them. In Algebra, we would write that like this:  –(X x 10⁹). That means there were billions of negative x’s covering the Earth.

All except for Noah (x) and his family (7x). Here's how the world's equation read at the time of Noah:

–(X x 10⁹) + 8X.

God's pretty good at math. He saw that the negatives hopelessly outnumbered the positives. If He didn't take immediate action to save the positives, the negatives would overwhelm them.

He set out to remove the negatives from the equation, leaving only the positives to replenish the world. He literally washed the –(X x 10⁹) off His blackboard with a flood of water, leaving only the 8x untouched.

It's a good thing He acted when He did, too. Why? 

We get the answer to that in Genesis 9:22. 

One of the positive X's, Ham, that God just made the effort to save became a -X as soon as the land dried. 

Genesis 9:22 tells us that Ham "uncovered his father's nakedness" - a Jewish euphemism that means he slept with his father's wife. Considering Noah's age of more than 600 years by the time this occurred, it's possible this wife was not Ham's mother but was another woman. The text doesn't tell us.

This was a common practice in the former corrupt world. It was an attempt by Ham to claim power and establish his dominance over his father. 

Thus 8x -x = 7x. There were just seven good people left in the world, assuming that Noah's wife was not complicit in Ham's actions.

The bottom line is this: When good is hopelessly outnumbered by bad, God will intervene in the name of justice to protect what is good by removing what is evil from the equation.

The moral of the story: Don't be a -X.