Noah's flood, as described in Genesis, was a real historical event.

Often those opposed to biblical creation revert to using logical fallacies, but I feel my opponent has expressed his disagreement in a respectful and rational way. The following is my rebuttal of Con's opening arguments. I will use the same titles as him to make my rebuttal easier to follow.1. GeneticsCon says, "Had a Global Flood occurred, we should expect to see evidence of this in our genome," which I agree with; indeed much evidence exists which is consistent with a genetic "bottle-necking. " For example, the ENCODE project, which compared the coding portion of human genomes, determined that humans share a remarkable genetic continuity of 99.5% (1). This is consistent with such earlier evidences of invariance as described in studies showing virtually no sequence variation in male introns which could have resulted from, ". . . male population bottlenecks, or historically small effective male population sizes" (2). Also consistent with this biblically historical event is the extensive linkage disequilibrium (a state of unmixed genes which lend to common inheritance) observed in the human genome which demonstrates a relatively recent, sharp reduction in the human population. This inheritance of unmixed genes demonstrates that mankind, ". . . experienced an extreme founder effect or bottleneck: a period when the population was so small that a few ancestral haplotypes gave rise to most of the haplotypes that exist today" (3). These triangles or the blocks of dark red represent SNPs (mutations) that are all in high linkage disequilibrium with each other and thus are all inherited together. As for your appeal to the "out of Africa" hypothesis, direct genetic data demonstrates this cannot be the case for many reasons including the examples I gave. This evolutionary conjecture is not consistent with the evidence (4). Much, much more data can be cited, but clearly there exists extensive evidence of genetic bottle-necking among humans consistent with a recent Flood event. I would point out however, that this seems to be an argument about Noah's ark and the family which survived in it, not an argument against the global Flood.2. Species SurvivalCon says, "Since there were only 8 humans on the ark, many diseases should have gone extinct. " This, however, assumes that all diseases which exist today were present at that time. Creationist Dr. Carl Wieland has addressed this issue by suggesting the following possibilities: specialization of pathogens, horizontal gene transfer, carriage by a symptomless host, and survival outside living organisms (5). Con asks, "How did the animals survive being preyed on and how did the predators survive by not over killing the animals? " While it is true that predation likely began after the Flood due to the destruction of most vegetation, it does not necessarily follow that all predatory animals began hunting immediately after leaving the ark. Then extant vegetation which may have survived the Flood, or seeds which quickly repopulated the Earth may have fed these creatures as well (6). We must be careful not to hold conjecture over hard scientific data. I have provided clear evidence for a global, catastrophic deluge, while it seems Con has hypothetically argued mostly against the ark. The CPT model says nothing about Noah's ark, the survivability of pathogens, or the biological interaction among organisms. I believe I have answered Con's objections to the biblical Flood, albeit his arguments were not directly concerned with the actual hyrdologic event. I thank Con for his time and look forward to defending my claims. References1 - . http://journals.plos.org...2 - . https://www.researchgate.net...3 - . http://creation.com...4 - . http://creation.com... | . http://creation.com...5 - . http://creation.com...6 - . http://creation.com...