Noach and Science

In a recent thought-provoking post, Lamed Zayin discusses various approaches to reconciling Science with Parshas Noach. One of the approaches he discusses is the following:

. . . since the Flood was miraculous anyways perhaps part of the miracle is that it left no evidence (what we can call the "magic water" theory). Of these three, only the last is reasonable, and it's theologically difficult. It requires assuming that God intentionally plants evidence to decieve our senses, and is akin to Gosse's suggestion that the world was created to look ancient.

I think he is dismissing this line of reasoning too glibly. We do believe the flood was a miraculous event. How can we know what sort of evidence it would leave if we do not know exactly what happened? How exactly do the waters of a miraculous world-wide flood behave? What was the process of removing the waters like? And while we don't believe that God "intentionally plants evidence to deceive our senses," don't we believe that cognitive dissonance is part of being a religious person here in the physical world? Perhaps it is our modern lot to worry about the physical evidence for the flood, while the ancients were more concerned with worrying about why the wicked often seem to prosper, but reconciling fatih and the empirical realm is not exactly a new problem.

I wonder if my background in Chassidus is influencing my thoughts here. Chassidus, after all, stresses that concealment is part of creation and that galus is particularly a time of concealment. The question is not so much why G-d would deceive us, but why did He desire this sort of world exactly. What sort of world would it be if science confirmed everything in the Torah? Lamed Zayin states:

Our tradition is quite to the contrary, that one should be able in theory, like Avraham, to recognize God from observing the world, not that the world was created in a way to hide God's presence.

Except that there is a quite extensive tradition in Judaism of saying precisely that "the world was created in a way to hide God's presence." Start with a Google search on the word "tzimtzum."