Literal belief in the flood story

[RobbyPants]

1) You assume God does magic tricks, I guess that's possible if one's mind can't fathom creation or one's mind is so much smaller than God's abilities to do what He has the power to accomplish. There is a huge difference between magic and power, you seem not to be able to see this, so I can see how you have become so confused about the entire story.

Differences in word choices such as "magic", "power", or "pepperoni pizza" are meaningless. Whatever it is that God does, he does something that we cannot. He creates universes from nothing through some process, and apparently creates and destroys water to facilitate a global flood. "Magic" is just a simple word to describe whatever phenomenal cosmic powers the Almighty is wielding. Clearly he's doing something. If not, then this flood was inevitable, and not caused by him.

The main point of my post is God does [something] and the flood happens. God does [something] and the flood ends. God chose not to do [something] to change the children, despite clearly being able to do [something] according to the rest of the Bible. Insert whatever word you feel most appropriately describes the power of the Almighty.

2) There was a mixing of salt water and fresh water, it would take a moron to believe different. Here are some facts, many species that live in the water can tolerate or live with no difficulty in brackish waters. So all fish would not have died in the flood. There would have been areas where the water would have contained enough salt to preserve life for those species that needed saltier waters and there would have been areas of totally fresh water for those species that could not tolerate salt, it's is a stratification of different waters that even occurs today. Go to South America where the Amazon River empties into the ocean, there is fresh water many miles out into the ocean. Another fact or two, many fish that live their lives in salt water move up fresh water rivers to spawn each year, eels move up rivers for many miles to spawn, the baby eels live in the freshwater and then move into the salty waters of the ocean to live until it's time for them to spawn. I've caught largemouth bass in Florida in salty waters that you would not want to drink and caught sea trout in waters not nearly as salty as they usually live in. Many of the shell fishes can live in fresh or salt water, all they need to survive is food and shelter from those that would consume them. I hope this shows you that God needed neither your supposed magic or His power to keep the water creatures going on with their lives.

I doubt this would have played out as you suggest, but I'm willing to simply drop the fish point, as it's not really important to my main point.

3) Like Orangebox21 said, your OP is presuming the story is true, isn't this correct? You believe all plant life would have been destroyed, I believe most of it was, but not the seeds which would have quickly brought back plant life. The story doesn't say when land first appeared after the flood, but we can assume the waters started to recede soon after the rain stopped. This would expose mountain tops where plant life could begin again, and you should remember that the ark was afloat for a year or more giving plant life time to take hold again. Even after the ark sat down Noah and the animals did not exit for some time. You should also remember, if your going to stay true to the story line, that Noah sent out a dove and it returned with a fig leaf signifying that the world was ready for them. So again God did not need your magic nor need to use His powers to restore a world He had already designed to be able to recover.

Actually, they weren't there very long. According to Genesis 8:1-11

• The waters remained for 150 days, and the ark rested on Mt Ararat on the 17th day of the 7th month.
  
• It wasn't until the 10th month that the mountain tops could be seen. So, no plant life at this point.
  
• 40 days later, Noah sends a raven and a dove out to find plants and they finds none. Not even a place to "set its foot".
  
• 7 days later he sends it again, and it finds a branch.
  

So, the literal time line, according to Genesis is that within seven days, the dove goes from not finding a place to set it's foot to finding a tree large enough to sprout a branch. Magic!

4) I think you should be able to see that the plant eaters had plenty to eat, you have to remember that there was a limited number of animals coming of the ark, it's not like they needed millions and millions of acres of food. So once again your magic was not needed nor did God need to invoke His powers to sustain the plant eaters.

No, because there was seriously a seven day period between when the dove couldn't find dry ground and when there were trees. I have no reason to believe that a plant population capable of sustaining plant eaters would be around in that short of a time line... barring magic.

5) Bet your thinking that the meat eaters will now produce a problem that will require God's special power, wrong. The amount of dead fish and animals from the flood would have given the meat eaters plenty to survive on until the animals of the ark began to reproducing enough to sustain them. There were many more herbivores than carnivores on the ark and herbivores reproduce at a much greater pace than carnivores and plant life reproduces at a far greater rate than herbivores. So every thing was in balance and ready to move on without your magic or the need for God's great powers and why, because God used those great powers at creation so the creation could sustain itself. God left nothing to chance.

Yeah... all that dead meat would start rotting... unless God preserved it with magic!

Also, your herbivore carnivore ratio doesn't matter. Entire species would be going extinct. Unless there were something like 60 deer and two wolves, you have a problem. If there are 30 herbivore pairs and one wolf pair, quite a few animals would die before procreating.

6) Genetics was no problem either for many reasons that I'm not going to get into, why, because we could drag this out on here forever and I'm not going through all that. God created in all the kinds the genetic diversity needed to survive such an event, remember God knew this time was coming. Again no magic nor extra powers needed all was taken care of at creation as far as the plant and animal life was concerned.

You aren't getting my point. If you reduce a population down to two members, that species would be incredibly susceptible to disease. Genetic diversity is what keeps the entire population from dying out every time a plague of some sort comes by.

7) Now I will address the evidence the flood left, do you really believe a flood of that size would leave behind any evidence, me too. The Bible suggest there was only one land mass at the time of the flood, we now have many. A flood of that size could have easily formed the Grand Canyon and other giant scars on the earth. With the continents moving mountains and great valleys and huge depressions would have been formed giving the flood waters places to reside and thus God's power would not have been needed to get rid of the waters that were always here. Now I will say here that for the continents to move as far as they did God may have used His power to reshape the earth while it was flooded. There are many places where fossils are found just piled upon each other as if a flood had brought then together and deposited them in a mass grave. Even animals that science says lived at different time and different places on the earth. The flood is quite a reasonable explanation for such things.

Floods don't cause cannons; rivers running continuously for eons do. Floods don't move continents; plate tectonics do over eons. As for "flood fossils", there are many, many other places where there is no such evidence. These explanations are just pseudoscience.

Also, there are plenty of things that wouldn't have survived that flood, such as fragile geological rock structures and those various trees that are more than five thousand years old.

8) Now to address your main point, the children. First you need to keep in mind God does not necessarily consider the flesh because it became temporary, in other words sin brought death to the flesh.
When God flooded the world it was to cleans the earth, evil had become so bad God saw it necessary to cleans the earth and start things over again and to this day evil has not reached that state, it will though but that's for another day.
When God flooded the world every man, woman and child died, and yes there was those children that were innocent. God knew the condition of man and these innocent children would have become as evil as their parents, evil was so dominant thy would not have escaped it. To prove this point God had Noah building the ark for over one hundred years and no children had escaped the evil during those many years. God leaves no stone unturned. So those children, those innocent children who died in the flood will be in heaven with God instead of like those who grew up and died in the flood as evil people. God had to cleanse the earth and in His grace He saved those innocent ones to live eternally with Him, so God never murdered innocent children, He gave them eternal life. You have to remember God deals in the spirit and spiritual because that is eternal and God is spirit not flesh. So when you or I have our head in the flesh God is dealing with and considering the spiritual.

Yeah, but he could have spared the children and had Noah raise them in a moral way. God didn't have to kill children. He had other options. He chose to kill children, pure and simple.

If God deals with the spirit, and that's what really matters, why are we even on earth in the first place? Why aren't we just souls in heaven?