I'm not much on apologetics. Either you believe in what the book says, or you don't. Trying to prove it all the time seems like a lack of faith to me.
FIFY although I must claim agnostic in this epic battle. Remember, I started out as a Catholic. ![grin =D](http://www.armedpolitesociety.com/Smileys/default/grin.gif)
It is an interesting idea. I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of a literalist believer to see if I would want to prove the flood empirically, or just accept it as faith in general...
After some thought, I think I would just accept it as a giant miracle, and stop looking for proof to defend belief. I mean, what are your options? If the flood story is true, what had to happen? Off the top of my head:
1. Divine gift of knowledge about boat building.
2. Divine intervention to transport animals from habitat to ark. Doubly hard for critters with strange symbiotic relationships, short life spans, exotic or specific diets, slow movement speed, land animals on other continents, animals that could not survive habitats between local habitat and ark site, etc.
3. Loading ~30,000,000 animals in the ark, in a day.
4. Feeding and caring for all those critters for months. For that matter, gathering food for animals with special diets (did Koala’s carry their own bamboo shoots, etc.)
5. The source of the water.
6. Where the water went.
7. Saltwater fish not dying from change in salt levels, freshwater fish not dying from change in salt levels, delicate fish surviving temp changes, etc.
8. Plant seeds surviving for months in water, then germinating and growing in climates they could survive, close enough to other species to pollinate, doubly hard for delicate plants, or plants with exotic life cycles that need very specific conditions.
9. Insects making it back from the ark to wherever those plants germinated in time to continue the life cycle (and insects breeding fast enough to do the work).
10. Carnivores having food to eat before prey animals are reestablished after the flood.
11. Same issue for herbivores, insects, critters and plants, again, with exotic life cycles.
12. Animals getting back to habitats after flood.
13. Inbreeding for leftover animals, having enough genetic diversity to account for current diversity among populations.
14. Humans, animals and plants must be protected from diseases until populations are reestablished.
15. Micro-organisms that cause those diseases must be…I dunno, held in stasis until that point, or just re-created directly by God at the appropriate time. For the ark too, there would have to be intervention to prevent disease but retain the capacity to create disease for the future.
16. Human inbreeding.
17. Humans establishing enough population to re-create civilizations like Egypt extraordinarily quickly. Or make it to China in time to start those civilizations.
18. Pressure changes in water due to additional depth
19. etc.
I can go on, but the point is every single example above requires a literal miracle of one sort or another. If that is the case, then why not just say the whole thing is a miracle? Why look for physical proof when the entire episode necessitates miracles at every turn? In such a story there isn’t any reason for there to have been any physical evidence, and there isn’t any reason to try and mount a scientific defense of the story anyway since you aren’t going to generate empirical evidence for any of these miracles. Any physical evidence you do find isn’t going to answer the questions of a skeptic who brings up a list like the one above anyway, the best you can do is generate a list of assumptions about the methods God *might* have used to work His miracles, but they would still be miracles.
Then the only questions are philosophical, all the usual stuff. Why kill everyone by drowning instead of just snapping your fingers and disappearing them, why would an omniscient being create something It knew It would need to destroy, how can God be good and do this, did the babies deserve to die, etc. But at least those questions are within the realm of theology.
Long story short, were I a theist I think I’d be with Jamis and Snowdog. (Which I am sure brings them both great comfort :) )