Was the 'Flood' necessary?

If creationists are honest their answer would be 'No',
because God could just make everyone on the planet disappear and leave only Noah and his family alive,
had he done that the animals need not have died and the 'Flood' story would be seen for what it is, a story.

Let's look at the 'Flood' and the interventions God needed to make in order for the 'Flood' story to work.

God told Noah he was going to flood the earth,
God then supplied the timber and the knowledge and all of the equipment needed to build the Ark,
(tools, cranes and such.)
God then brought all of the animals from their different countries to the Ark,
God then flooded the earth,
God then fed the animals and Noah for a year while the water was covering the earth,
God then made the water disappear,
God then sent all of the animals back to the countries they had come from,
God then fed the animals and Noah for at least another year because all of the trees and plants were dead,
(they had been under water for a year)
God stopped carnivores (tigers, lions) from eating meat,
God then took Noah's decedents all over the earth and changed them into the different colours and tribes we have today,

And God did all of this, WHY?
answer, God didn't, the 'Flood' story is just that, a story someone made up, to be told to children.

Unless of course you think your God was not very bright, and caused the 'Flood' for fun?

PS. 'God works in mysterious ways' is just another way of saying, 'God doesn't know what he's doing'.

If you think I have got it all wrong, tell me why.

The Flood was a setup for baptism. In the Flood, evil was destroyed, and a good man and his family was saved. In baptism, you leave your sins behind you, and behave good. The dove was sent out after the flood receded to let Noah know the waters have gone down. The Holy Spirit came down on Jesus like a dove when he was baptized.

There are a great many things in the Old Testament that were done as an allusion or prophecy towards Jesus.

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August 21, 2003: God spoke to me,"Good News", and that same day I received a Good News bible.

Have you any comments on anything I mentioned?
or do you think it best not to analyse the story to much?

funny, it doesnt say that in my bible.

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"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" - Theodosius Dobzhansky

Evolution: 3 billion base pairs can't be wrong.

Doesn't matter. When it comes to interpretation of scripture everyone can do whatever they want with it. That's one of the neat things about religion, and Christianity in particular. You can say whatever you wish without having to worry about making sense or backing it up. This is why Christianity has about 38,000 denominations. It's a do-it-yourself religion.

You don't have the guidance of the Holy Spirit!

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“The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense." -Bishop John Shelby Spong

"It is not the obligation of the State to reconcile various faiths with reality. Do it yourself." -Atomweaver

"We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster."
- Carl Sagan (Demon Haunted World)

Are you saying that the flood story is symbolic or the flood itself is symbolic?

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I would say it was a story adapted from Babylonian and Egyptian mythologies, designed to demonstrate a theological point, rather than a history. It was not strictly for children.

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“The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense." -Bishop John Shelby Spong

"It is not the obligation of the State to reconcile various faiths with reality. Do it yourself." -Atomweaver

"We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster."
- Carl Sagan (Demon Haunted World)

Originally Posted by consol

If creationists are honest their answer would be 'No'...

If you think I have got it all wrong, tell me why.

Then where's the water canopy?

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As a Christian, I would say that Split Rock has it exactly right.

Here is what C.S. Lewis said about such things, a bit long, but very much worth it, just to hear his lucid prose:

I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous. Some people find the miraculous so hard to believe that they cannot imagine any reason for my acceptance of it other than a prior belief that every sentence of the Old Testament has historical or scientific truth. But this I do not hold, any more than St. Jerome did when he said that Moses described Creation "after the manner of a popular poet" (as we should say, mythically) or than Calvin did when he doubted whether the story of Job were history or fiction. The real reason why I can accept as historical a story in which a miracle occurs is that I have never found any philosophical grounds for the universal negative proposition that miracles do not happen. I have to decide on quite other grounds (if I decide at all) whether a given narrative is historical or not. The Book of Job appears to me unhistorical because it begins about a man quite unconnected with all history or even legend, with no genealogy, living in a country of which the Bible elsewhere has hardly anything to say; because, in fact, the author quite obviously writes as a story-teller not as a chronicler.

I have therefore no difficulty in accepting, say, the view of those scholars who tell us that the account of Creation in Genesis is derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical. We must of course be quite clear what "derived from" means. Stories do not reproduce their species like mice. They are told by men. Each re-teller either repeats exactly what his predecessor had told him or else changes it. He may change it unknowingly or deliberately. If he changes it deliberately, his invention, his sense of form, his ethics, his ideas of what is fit, or edifying, or merely interesting, all come in. If unknowingly, then his unconscious (which is so largely responsible for our forgettings) has been at work. Thus at every step in what is called--a little misleadingly--the "evolution" of a story, a man, all he is and all his attitudes, are involved. And no good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights. When a series of such retellings turns a creation story which at first had almost no religious or metaphysical significance into a story which achieves the idea of true Creation and of a transcendent Creator (as Genesis does), then nothing will make me believe that some of the re-tellers, or some one of them, has not been guided by God.

Thus something originally merely natural--the kind of myth that is found amongst most nations--will have been raised by God above itself, qualified by Him and compelled by Him to serve purposes which of itself would not have served. Generalising this, I take it that the whole Old Testament consists of the same sort of material as any other literature--chronicle (some of it obviously pretty accurate), poems, moral and political diatribes, romances, and what not; but all taken into the service of Gods word. Not all, I suppose, in the same way. There are prophets who write with the clearest awareness that Divine compulsion is upon them. There are chroniclers whose intention may have been merely to record. There are poets like those in the Song of Songs who probably never dreamed of any but a secular and natural purpose in what they composed. There is (and it is not less important) the work first of the Jewish and then of the Christian Church in preserving and canonising just these books. There is the work of redactors and editors in modifying them. On all of these I suppose a Divine pressure; of which not by any means all need have been conscious.

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivet, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not "the Word of God" in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.

To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems, not doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle. We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form--something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table. One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalists view of the Bible and the Roman Catholics view of the Church. But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this. For we are mortals and do not know what is best for us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done--especially when we cannot, for the life of us, see that He has after all done it.

We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the "wise-crack". He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be "got up" as if it were a "subject". If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, "pinned down". The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam.

C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958), 109.

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In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different Interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. - St. Augustine, in his analysis of Genesis.