Literal belief in the flood story

[Chas]

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A while back, I got into this argument with someone on RRS. If you believe in a literal account of the flood story, the take home is that God willingly killed children because he wanted to, and there is no other possible conclusion.

So, to start with this, if we assume there exists a god that is powerful enough to create universes out of nothing, then it's certainly plausible that there exists a god who could summon a bunch of water out of nothing, leave it on earth a while, and then magic it all away. It's not that difficult to accept once we've made the initial assumption. That being said, there are a lot of other problems with the flood myth that don't jive with the really real world:

• The mixing of fresh and salt water would have killed countless fish.
  
• Most or all terrestrial plants would have died.
  
• The herbivores wouldn't have had enough to eat when they came off the ark.
  
• The carnivores would have quickly killed all the herbivores when they got off the ark, then starved when there was no food.
  
• Every species on the planet would have had a genetic bottle neck 5,000 years ago.
  

So, if we assume God can magic up universes from nothing, and magic water up out of nothing and magic it away, then presumably he can magic up some solutions to those problems. So he uses magic to keep the fish alive. He uses magic to keep the plants alive or simply respawns a bunch of new ones later; it's all the same. He either magically sustains the carnivores and keeps them from reproducing while herbivore populations increase to where they could sustain the carnivores, or he holds them in suspended animation during this time. He also makes sure that none of the species get wiped out by a single disease until the species can become more genetically diverse.

Again, this isn't hard to accept in terms of feasibility if he's out there creating universes. We can certainly question why he'd go through such a convoluted plot to kill all the wicked people when a bunch of well-aimed lightning strikes would have done the job. We can question why he magiced all the evidence of the flood away and later based admittance criteria for heaven on belief. Still, it doesn't prove that he couldn't have done it.


The problem is: the children. The whole notion is God was mad at the wicked people, so he killed them and their kids to make things right. Now, there's no way that the children who were sufficiently young would have been wicked, so why did he kill them? Given all the hoops he had to jump through that I outline earlier, he could have totally saved them; he saved all the fish and terrestrial plants. Also rock formations. He took the time to save fragile geological rock formations, but not the kids. The take home message here is God wanted to kill the children; he had other options. Literally, according to the apologetics, an infinite number of other options.


Now, I've heard Christians respond that the other kids were going to grow up wicked, so that's why he killed them. Two problems:

1) Couldn't Noah have raised them in a moral manner while God fed them manna from heaven, or something?

2) Doesn't this completely violate the concept of free will? Whoops! There goes most of your contemporary apologetics for the problem of evil and the reason for the flood in the first place!


This myth is stupidly contrived and terrible. When people accept it as true, they make some of the most creepy, and morally bankrupt excuses for God I have ever heard.

I've read most but not all the post and those opposed to the flood are picking little things here and there to make an argument instead of looking at what is given in the story. I do believe in the flood, I believe in the truth of scriptures, if I did not I would have to reject the entire thing, with that said let's look at what's been proposed.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

GC

PS, I may not have time to respond to any comments you have about what I posted but I will read them if you do respond, I just do not have much time to respond at this time, very busy. Also my E key is giving me problems so you may have to read a few E's in.

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Except everything you just said is counter to fact and evidence. So there's that.