The biblical Flood

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument that The Flood happens, exactly as described in Genesis, Chapters 6, 7 & 8, and breeding pairs of every animal have been safely returned to their homelands. Perhaps, given time, the pairs of giraffes, elands, zebras, wildebeests, etc., would reproduce and repopulate Africa. But wait a minute! We also have pairs of lions, cheetahs, leopards and other carnivores which require food. And guess what they eat! Either the carnivores kill one or both of most pairs of herbivores, which means no more zebras, giraffes, etc., or they can’t catch them, in which case they starve to death. And there is another problem; – the trees, grass and other vegetation that form the food supply of the herbivorous animals couldn’t possibly survive being submerged by thousands of feet of salty water for almost a year.

The flood itself is obviously a meteorological impossibility. The story in Genesis tells us that all the mountains were covered. Let’s assume a depth of 25,000 feet, which would cover all but the very highest mountains.  All this water supposedly fell in forty days and nights, or 960 hours.  This works out to a rainfall of 5 inches per minute.  Considering that 6 inches per hour is a real cloudburst, a rate 50 times as great would be impossible.  Then there is the problem of where this water came from, and where  it all disappeared to afterward.

After all these obvious impossibilities, we come to the most important question.  Why did God go to all this trouble?  If he truly is omniscient and omnipotent, surely he could have devised a much simpler method of eliminating the wicked members of the human race, without the trouble of producing all that extra water and having to drown 99.99% of the innocent mammals, birds, reptiles and insects on the Earth.  Even I, who am not omniscient, could have done better.  I would simply have created a very hardy air-born virus that was 100% fatal to humans, and presto, no more people.  For Noah and his family I would prepare a vaccine and inject it into their goats’ milk.    Then the Bible would have read as follows:  “The Lord, being sorely vexed, caused a great plague to fall upon the wicked, such that they died in great agony.  Only Noah and his family were spared by God, who cast a magical spell upon them such that the plague did not harm them.” It seems to me that the reason the mythical flood was used is that the people of biblical times never heard of viruses.