Fundie Beliefs # 22 - Noah and the Flood
Eventually, God got so disgusted with humans that He decided to kill them all by covering the earth with a huge flood*. But He liked one guy, Noah, and decided to spare him and his wife and sons and daughters-in-law. For unknown reasons, He decided to kill all the air-breathing animals, too; though it’s not clear what sort of sins they committed. God was not, however, as completely indifferent to the "collateral damage" as He was later with the Amalekites. So He decided to keep a couple of each air-breathing animal - plus a few extra of the more edible ones - so they could re-grow. Plants were left on their own. Fish and other water animals also seem to have been left to sink or swim. Whales were still fish back then, so they were on their own, too.
Noah gathered the land animals, which in those days, either all lived near each other or were brought together by God - the Bible isn’t clear on this point. How he selected the two godly animals from among the sinful ones isn’t discussed. God sent a huge flood that covered all the mountains, which were a lot lower until the Flood caused earthquakes**.
The Flood killed everything except the water-dwelling animals, plants, fungi and bacteria - although the cacti must have had a close call with all that water. It’s not clear whether the water was salty or fresh, though some theorize that the salt wasn’t added to the oceans until after the flood. The Bible is silent on the issue.
Eventually, the water went somewhere - (Neptune, according to the famous Internet fundie, AV1611VET). Then the animals went back to their own places: the two llamas swam 2,500 miles across the Atlantic to South America, hacked their way across the Amazon jungles and climbed up into the newly-formed Andes, where either God or "micro-evolution" gave them a new form of hemoglobin to cope with the lack of air. The Gila monsters swam the Atlantic and settled in the US deserts, the penguins went to Antarctica and the polar bears headed to the frozen North. The two Australian giant earthworms tunneled under the Kavir desert, across India, island-hopped down the Malay Peninsula and burrowed under the ocean bed to emerge in Australia. Noah’s wife went back to the kitchen where she belonged. Noah’s boat settled in Turkey, where it can still be seen by anyone with an imagination.
God felt guilty and promised He wouldn’t kill everybody again, at least with water. He changed the molecular structure of water, or maybe its refractive properties, so that sunlight passing through rain drops would be separated into its component colors and would cause the appearance of a rainbow; something which apparently didn’t happen before the Flood. Why this didn’t alter the chemical properties of the water in Noah and his family isn’t explained. As the water receded, it carved out the Grand Canyon and buried the dinosaurs in neat layers, except for one left wandering around the Paluxy River in Texas where it stepped on some guy’s foot***, and a plesiosaur left in Loch Ness to scare the tourists.
* It’s not clear why the creator of the universe couldn’t just turn all the humans into pillars of salt like He did with Mrs. Lot, as opposed to using the messy roundabout flood method, but it’s not our business to question the ways of our blessed Lord.
**The Bible doesn’t actually say there were earthquakes, but since there couldn’t be enough water to cover Mt. Everest to a depth of 15 cubits, the mountains must have been created after the area was covered. See the section on biblical inerrancy.
*** c.f. the "Paluxy Man-Prints"