Sorry but I've been thinking about this quite a lot this morning and I really needed to ask some questions here. I'll try to limit them to what's been mentioned already.

I just can't get over this idea, for a start, that an omniscient God (presumably you believe he is all-knowing and all-seeing) would decide he'd made a mistake and wipe out almost every living thing on earth, including plants and animals that presumably could not have been morally good or evil as such. Didn't he know from the start that people would behave in a way he didn't like, and why didn't he do anything about it before he decided to kill them? Was every single person in the world apart from Noah and his family evil enough to deserve to be drowned in a flood?

Genesis 7:19-23 explicitly says what happened during the flood. It says, "and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark." How were there creatures surviving on floating vegetation when the Bible says everything not inside the ark was killed? How else can you possibly read this?

Can someone here address the diversity of insect life on earth if there was a flood? So it makes sense that all of the approximately 850,000 species of insects on earth are descended from those who survived the flood either on floating mats of vegetation or on the ark as accidental passengers?

In fact, the vast majority of insect species and in some cases entire families and even orders could not have survived a year of flood on floating vegetation and many, perhaps the majority of species could not have survived the flood either on or off the ark.

Consider the 1500 species of the order Ephemeroptera (mayflies), which only live in fresh water and in which the adult lives only 1 day or less (some only live 90 minutes) during which time it must mate and lay eggs. Even if they somehow survived the salty flood water, (which most could not), they will be greatly spread out by the flood. How will they find their mates and where will they lay their eggs? There are many other insect species that only live in fresh water during parts of their life cycle. How will they survive the flood?

Then there are the social insects such as bees, ants and wasps,that require a queen and a colony. All those yellow jacket wasps I used to see flying around in the autumn will die by winter. They are workers; the queen and colonies only survive in holes in the ground. How will they survive a worldwide flood on floating vegetation? In Missouri we had large wasps called sand hornets or more properly cicada killer wasps. They dig their burrows in sand or soft earth and lay their eggs in locusts that they have killed. The adults do not survive over winter. How will their eggs survive a worldwide flood? You can usually wash them out with a garden hose if you want to.

The caterpillar of the monarch butterfly only lives on living milkweed plants, Monarchs go through more than one life cycle a year and the adults only feed on nectar. While many species of lepidoptera eat various plants, many others eat only specific plants, even if the caterpillars survived somehow, how would cocoons survive, and even if they did how would the adults find other adults to mate with and where would they lay their eggs? Generally, all these life cycles are complete in a year or less and in many cases much less. Many of these butterflies and moths are quite fragile. Many other insects require specific living plants or animals for parts of their life cycles. What about all those insects that feed on nectar from living flowers during parts of their life cycles? How would they survive a year on floating vegetation?

Consider parasitic wasps known as chalcids.

Below is a quote about them from

http://res2.agr.ca/ecorc/apss/chalintr.htm



Chalchids don't sound like they would do too well on floating vegetation for a year.

How about desert insects and arachnids that are adapted to live in very dry climates? Do you really think they could all survive for a year in water on floating vegetation?

There are also the cicadas, like the so-called 17 year locusts, that live most of their lives in the ground under a tree, then emerge, live for a short while, mate and lay their eggs in the branches of a tree. After a few days or weeks the eggs hatch and the larvae drop to the ground to live under the tree till the next cycle. They need healthy trees that will live until the next cycle. How did they survive a worldwide flood that supposedly rearranged all the world's geology on floating vegetation? What about all the other insects that require mature living trees for their life cycles? How could they have survived after the flood?

There are huge numbers of parasitic insects and invertebrates that require specialized animal hosts for at least part of their annual life cycle. Do you think those poor animals on the ark were carrying all the parasites of their respective 'kinds'? Did the humans carry all the fleas and ticks and other insect parasites that plague mankind? What about all the other invertebrate parasites, such as liver flukes and blood flukes, some of which are fatal? Did the animals and people on the ark carry all these parasites?

These are only a few examples. I am sure that anyone with knowledge of entomology can think of many, many more.

A few other questions about what's been said here.

Bex, you seem to be claiming that God inundated the world with all the water in the oceans -- is this where the 40 days' and 40 nights' rain came from -- and in that case, where's the global layer of salt that would be left behind? Can you present a geological model for how the water in the oceans would rise up and either condense in the sky to form as clouds and rain back down, or rise up and just sweep over the world?

How did all the freshwater species of fish survive?

Bex, can you give specific references for these examples you give of fossils forming in catastrophic circumstances? Sometimes this does happen but I'd like to look up your examples; names of areas would be nice for a start, and maybe a year in which the fossils were found. We'll leave the claim of the Grand Canyon being formed in minutes or hours for another discussion. There are as many questions I'd ask you there as there are for the flood, starting with how you think angular conformities could have formed in that timeframe.

I still haven't seen anyone explain why there is no genetic bottleneck in all species at the time of the flood, when almost every living thing was supposedly destroyed. Are the geneticists lying along with the rest of all the scientists then?

More to the point about seashells on top of mountains. You will notice that they are not found in one layer where all shells and fossils are mixed, as you would expect to see from one global flood event. Instead, the shells and fossils can be found deep into the rock of the mountain itself, in many different kinds of strata, some of which can only be formed by anhydrous (without water) processes. Geology can explain this by uplift: the shells and fossils were deposited in their respective strata over millions of years and were then uplifted by geological processes. This is how the Himalayas continue to be formed today: the India plate is subducting under the Asian plate and this is pushing the mountains up. How does the creation model explain these phenomena in a more convincing way? And why are the shells and fossils layered in the same specific way that they are layered across the world, trilobites never mixing with mammals for example? We don't see mixing occurring in this way, nor do we see some kind of "sorting" where the heaviest creatures would have sunk to the bottom.

There really are hundreds more questions to ask about this but I'll stop here and give people a chance to explain.