Literal belief in the flood story

[Godscreated]

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.

Really word choice doesn't matter, magic is not considered to be real, yet you apply it to a situation you are portraying as real, whether you believe it or not.

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.

God did cause the rain to begin and the waters below to erupt, it wasn't magic though, it was the same power that He used to create. He chose to have those children to be in heaven rather than an eternal hell, I personally see this as a good thing. I can no more describe what God's power is than you can and like I said to begin with small minds that deny the God of creation haven't a clue.

2)

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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.

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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.

Then why did you bring it up in the first place, surely you mentioned it for a purpose.

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.

2.5 months for plants to start growing as the mountain tops appeared one by one over that span of time. The mountains were only 22.5 feet under the flood waters, plenty of sunlight can penetrate that distance, but nevertheless there was time for plant life to start.

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!

You should read the scriptures closer, the raven went first and flew here and there till the earth dried up. This is an unspecified amount of time, but by a little math we can see it was around 4 months. Noah was on the ark 1 year and 10 days according to the time given in the scriptures. So from the 7th month till the 2 month of the following year the plants had time to grow and trees sprout leaves soon after they sprout through the earth, no magic just as things were set up.

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.

The waters had receded before the dove was released, the ground had not dried up enough for the animals to move around but the plants had began to grow. From the time the dove brought back the leaf and Noah left the ark was nearly 2 months, you should study the scriptures instead of picking through the net for random facts, you might find more truth than you think.

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!

No magic or extra powers, the meat had began to rot and most was probably gone, but you do know animals eat rotted meat all the time, they still don't have refrigerators to this day.

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.

With the amount of dead animals and fish lying around I doubt the predators would expend energy chasing prey and who knows the extinction of some animals may have been part of God's plan. You must be a city boy so I'll go into more detail here, there would have been plenty of extremely shallow seas and lakes where the carnivores could have fresh meat from the fish in them and plenty of rivers for them to take food from. No magic and no extra powers needed. Like I said the design of prey reproducing much faster than predators and plants out producing
herbivores by a great percentage everything would be in balance.

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.

What disease, man lived long lives what makes you believe animals would be any different during Noah's day. Like I said God created genetic diversity into the animals and man to survive such an event and continue on into the future. An Omniscient being is not going to miss the finer details.

7)

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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.

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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.

You must have missed the Mt. Saint Helen's destruction, the flood of water from the snow melt ground out a small canyon in less than a day, so why couldn't flood waters running down mountains carve out the great canyons of today, they could have. If the Colorado River carved out the Grand Canyon then where is the great delta it would have created. The Mississippi River has created an enormous delta and the Mississippi would have to be a younger river than the Colorado or there would be a canyon so wide we could only fly across it. So where is the delta that would be made of nearly all sandstone.
How do you know that a flood of such enormity would not help in moving continents? We do not have any way to test that.
As for the fossil evidence, do you believe because you can show that fossils in parts of the world are of animals from one time period, negates the evidence of fossils that are of different animals from different time periods and are massed together just as a flood would leave them. Mt. Saint Helen's eruption has taught us many things, that is for those who look at the evidence with truth in mind.

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.

What makes you think the flood could not have left these fragile rock formations and what evidence do you have that those trees could not have survived the flood, like I said earlier the highest mountains were only 22.5 feet below the water not nearly deep enough to keep out sunlight. Then maybe God did use His powers on a few things, what a great way to disguise a world wide flood.

8)

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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.

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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?
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Yeah, God could have done whatever He wanted to, but He didn't. God chose this way and guess what, being God He didn't need your permission nor your fallible thoughts to carry out His plan. God being able to see into the future knew what was best for these children.
We are here to make our choice where we want to spend eternity, with God or separated from Him and through Christ God has given us each a way to choose.

GC

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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.

Where's your proof, you always make comments with nothing to back them up.

GC