Literal belief in the flood story

[RobbyPants]

So I take it you don't buy into the "age of accountability" apologetics? Assuming a baby hasn't made a conscious effort to accept Jesus as his/her lord and savior, the baby goes to hell if it dies?

I do believe the Bible speaks of the age of accountability. Prior to the age of accountability or in cases of the mentally handicapped, situations where a person cannot make a profession of faith, Christ's grace covers their sin without a profession. So no, a person before the age of accountability does not go to hell, just the opposite.

So, were the children that drown before the age of accountability wicked?

And even still, you haven't addressed the part of my OP where I asked why God couldn't have had Noah raise the children in a moral fashion. We know that children are impressionable and can be raised in a good or bad way, and it will influence how they turn out.

Are you proposing he kidnap them?

Are you proposing you strawman me? I said it right in the OP: God magiced up all sorts of solutions to problems that would have arose. Seriously: how did the carnivores survive right off the ark without obliterating the herbivore populations? God had to do something to correct that problem. If Noah had brought something like sixty herbivores and two carnivores, it wouldn't be a problem, but that's not what the Bible says.

So, the point is: God obviously is capable of intervening in very specific ways to make his whole flood plot play out in the way as it's described. He had an infinite number of ways to keep the kids safe until after the waters receded and he didn't.

If you are going to assert that they are wicked and nothing could be done, then I take it you do not believe in free will?

It is not my assertion to make, I'm simply relaying the message written in the Word. It says what is written. They used their "free will" to use their minds to let "every imagination of the thoughts of their hearts to be only evil continually."

But there's no way the children before the age of accountability could have been raised in a moral fashion by Noah and improved? It's getting right into the two options mentioned below.

Free will is the entire justification for the flood myth. You can't have it both ways. Either:

1) God could have taken steps to make sure the children were saved so they could be raised in a better way (remember, he went out of his way to magically solve all the things I listed in the OP), or

2) The children are incapable of being raised in a moral way and having it work. If that's the case, there is no free will.

There is no magical third option.

The dilemma has been created in your own mind and it is a 'false' one. You believe in magic but not more than two options?

In summation most of the arguments stated here misrepresent what the scriptures say. God judged the earth because the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Somehow that statement in the posters minds becomes: God murders babies. You have created a false image, a straw man, to be precise.

Then please, elaborate. What is this magical third option of which you speak. If you can't explain how that's a false dilemma, then I can't take your accusation very seriously.

Do you believe that if the children had had survived the flood that they could have improved under the moral guidance of Noah? Yes or no?

If yes, then why didn't God save them? The only answer is he wanted to drown them, and nothing more.

If no, then what about free will? If there's no way they can be changed, then that flies against free will.