However, if Noah's Flood was merely local:

1. Why did Noah take birds on board? They could have simply flown out of the flood zone.
2. If the rainbow was God's promise to never again send a local flood, then He's broken His promise thousands of times since then.
3. How stupid would Noah have been to spend almost a century building a huge ship, when all the while he could have just traveled a few days to a non-flooded area to escape it?
4. If the Flood was God's judgment on mankind, then other parts of the world were unaffected by this local flood, so people living elsewhere also escaped God's judgment.
5. If other parts of the world were unaffected, why did Noah load two of every kind of animal on board? Most were alive and well elsewhere on the earth.
6. Noah's Flood is compared by the apostle Peter to the coming judgment by fire to purge the earth at the end of time. A partial flood in Noah's day means a partial judgment of fire before Judgment Day.
7. The Genesis text says that Noah's ark was drifting for eight months on the waters. But water seeks its own level, and a huge ship like the ark would not have been afloat on a mere local flood, especially since the text says that "ALL the high mountains" were underwater to at least six cubits. The water would have drained out to the sea in a matter of hours, not months. No one has ever been able to point to a local flood anywhere that could have accommodated a ship like Noah's ark for eight months.