Well, I already conceded the mystery of revelation.
Clearly, Noachian Flood deniers are going to ask
who told Moses what Noah saw and did during the Flood events. (Assuming Moses is the source of Genesis.)
Self-evidently, there are flood events described which Noah didn't see with his own eyes. But Noah could infer facts from
what God told him and Moses could have likewise received knowledge of those events from God and/or oral history.
Revelation is a notoriously unreliable method for historical analysis and for scientific discovery. One man's revelation is another man's delusions. How is an unbiased third party supposed to tell the difference? And if Charles Darwin had said, "God told me that speciation occurs due to natural selection over millions of years," would that settle the matter in your mind?
Neither is it sound logic to exclude divine/miraculous intervention from an event which is overwhelmingly understood to be an act of God.
I'm afraid I must disagree with you there. It is always sound logic to exclude divine intervention. To allow such a thing would introduce chaos to an infinite degree. Every accused criminal would argue that it was God who committed the murder and planted the evidence pointing to the accused. Every scientific experiment would be cast in doubt as to be the result of God's thumb on the scale. Every act of kindness, every act of cruelty, every single event in the course of history would be unexplainable.
Imagine the following argument: "Let's say for the sake of argument that God can do anything. Did anything happen? Then God did it. Q.E.D." Would you accept that argument in other areas besides those intersecting your faith?
And if the Noachian Flood is understood to be an act of God, then it demonstrates the cruel and capricious nature of the God you worship. Per Genesis, God was heartbroken at the wickedness of Noah's generation. The solution--the only solution that the omniscient Jehovah could come up with--was to drown an entire world. What ever happened to the enticement of the Holy Spirit, drawing us to God? What happened to the notion of incarnating as a human and offering himself as a sacrifice to save the lost? What happened to God not being willing for "
any little one to perish"?
After all, if God just wanted to eliminate wicked people, he could have simply used his miraculous power to give each one of them an aneurysm. No need to drown an entire world--plants, animals, infants, the mentally handicapped--just to get rid of a few bad apples. It would be like burning down a house to get rid of an infestation of ants--except there are people in the house too. You say that God was going to drown wicked people but he gave Noah advance notice along with instructions on building a boat. But that took time, didn't it? What about the people who were born between the time God warned Noah and the time the rains started to fall? How could God have known that people not even born yet were going to be depraved? Are you telling me that the babies that were born the day before Noah entered his ark--the one-day-old infants--were so filled with evil that the only recourse for them was to drown in their cribs?
Sorry, I don't believe it. If the flood is an act of God, then God is guilty of genocide of the highest order. That anyone would turn around and call such a good "righteous" is baffling to me.
Fortunately, the physical evidence against a world-wide deluge is so overwhelming that I don't need to entertain the notion of a genocidal God.
