So your question is basically: Can someone give me a relatively simple, logical, realistic explanation for the story of Noah's Ark?
Probably not.
Flood "epics" appear in quite a few ancient texts. The idea of such a story was nothing new around the time the Bible is dated. The story of Noah is quite similar to that of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh and the character, Noah, shares a good deal of similarities with the Sumerian fictional character, Tagtug. A very brief explanation of Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh (more can be found, but I'll leave that to you):
The Sumerian hero Gilgamesh traveled the world in search of a way to cheat death. On one of his journeys, he came across an old man, Utnapishtim, who told Gilgamesh a story from centuries past. The gods brought a flood that swallowed the earth.
The gods were angry at mankind so they sent a flood to destroy him. The god Ea, warned Utnapishtim and instructed him to build an enormous boat to save himself, his family, and "the seed of all living things." He does so, and the gods brought rain which caused the water to rise for many days. When the rains subsided, the boat landed on a mountain, and Utnapishtim set loose first a dove, then a swallow, and finally a raven, which found land. The god Ishtar, created the rainbow and placed it in the sky, as a reminder to the gods and a pledge to mankind that there would be no more floods.
There is a good deal evidence that supports large scale floods (NOT global) throughout history. The Black Sea flood hypothesis matches up somewhat closely to many ancient stories of large scale floods. It's still quite a controversial proposal though.
The point is there is currently no geological, paleontological or archaeological support for any serious flood at the period indicated, and any contemporaneous record is likely to be referring to a previous event or is based on a previous epic/tale/myth of another culture.
Moving on to something else you said:
Why is ignorance a respectable attribute? What in the world could ignorance possibly yield us? I find it depressing such a great number of people hold the thought that ignorance is somehow "good." Look around. Even after centuries of people chasing every bit of knowledge possible and it creating just about every single thing you use daily, ignorance is still a good thing? How does the acceptance of ignorance help us at all?