The Christian church is increasingly ambivalent about the recent, unique, catastrophic global Flood described in Genesis. Until the eighteenth-century challenge from 'Enlightenment' philosophy, there was a majority view that it was a carefully described real event. Since then, an influential portion of contemporary evangelical scholars insist, pressured by mainstream geology, that there is no evidence for that Flood. Using ancient Near Eastern comparative literature, they reinterpret the biblical text as less historical than theological and literary, or at least more limited geographically. The thesis of this two-part paper is that the Genesis "fountains of the great deep" are a key detail in a record whose ancient context highlights its historical trustworthiness, carrying powerful theological and geological implications that cannot be ignored. The catastrophic Flood was real and global, leaving abundant evidence in the rocks and fossils. As such, 'deep time' interpretations do not do justice to the biblical text and its theology, nor to the geology. This paper explains our theological reasoning.