The flood narrative's relation to the physical earth has its own separate history from its relation to other ancient texts. Early modern natural philosophers, including figures within the Royal Society, took a global deluge as a live geological hypothesis and looked for its traces in fossils and strata; "diluvialism" was a working scientific position, not yet a fringe one, well into the early nineteenth century.
Two developments ended that. Geologists including Charles Lyell argued from the 1830s that the earth's strata record gradual, uniform processes over vast spans rather than a single catastrophic inundation, and the uniformitarian account displaced diluvialism within the emerging discipline. Separately, biblical scholarship's source-critical work on Genesis, associating the flood account with more than one underlying strand woven together, complicated the assumption that Genesis 6-9 was reporting a single eyewitness memory rather than a composite text.
Neither development ended the claim as a matter of religious conviction. A minority of conservative Protestant Christians maintains "flood geology," associated with the young-earth creationist movement that grew from the mid-twentieth century, holding that a literal global flood explains major geological features including most sedimentary rock and the fossil record. Geological and biological sciences do not support this reading, and mainstream biblical scholarship treats the underlying account as composite; the position persists chiefly as a doctrinal commitment within specific denominations and institutions rather than as a claim argued on geological evidence within the earth sciences themselves.