Problems With The Good Book

I freely admit that before I went on my mission at age 19, I had never read the Bible all the way through.  I had read The Book of Mormon several times, most of The Doctrine and Covenants, parts of The Pearl of Great Price, and parts of the Bible (I think I had read most of The New Testament, but only small portions of The Old Testament.)  Add to 'the quad' the missionary training manual, Jesus the Christ, Our Heritage, Our Search for Happiness, and True to the Faith, and you have ALL the reading material that missionaries are allowed.  Some mission presidents would also suggest reading The Miracle of Forgiveness, but I think that is just cruel and unusual punishment for a missionary and is a good way to get him or her to want to give up and go home.  But I digress.  Even with that limited set of reading materials, I still didn't make it through the Bible on my mission.  It's not that I wasn't dedicated to my spiritual nourishment, but maybe we can assume I was also trying to learn a new language.

Some time after my mission I got married.  Kids and work and life used a lot of my time and some of my spiritual nourishment habits, weak as they may have been, atrophied a bit.  Periodically, I would try my hand at a newly instituted daily routine of scripture study or personal prayer.  Sometimes they would last, mostly they didn't.  But I did continue to go to church and was a very happy, well-adjusted true believing member of the LDS faith.  I did not have much on my questions 'shelf' yet.  Nothing noteworthy that I can remember anyway.

It was not until I finally got time and then a good strong habit of daily scripture study that I made it through all of the standard works, one after the other.  I had lots of questions.  I asked people I could trust for their opinions.  I discussed some of the weird things I found with my wife.  Some questions got answered, some didn't.  In the end, my shelf was much heavier than it was the year before.

Some of my questions were along these lines:

1. Why do the accounts of the creation in Genesis, Moses, and Abraham differ?  And why does the account in the Endowment differ even more?  I can see Genesis and Abraham both having flaws, because they were translated.  But Moses and the Endowment were both revealed directly to Joseph, so they should both be 'perfect.'
2. I believe that science has shown that evolution is true, but how does that work with Creation then?  This is a real conundrum.
3. What death before the fall of Adam?  How could evolution have worked if there was no death?
4. Speaking of Adam, how do we get the diversity of the human race from two people?  Don't tell me that God cursed Cain to be a black man....
5. Again, how do we account for human remains that are older than 7000 years?  Are you really going to say that radio-carbon dating is a fraud?
6. How could the great flood have happened at all?  So many questions here...

1. Do you know how fast the flood waters would have to accumulate in order to cover the entire earth in 40 days?  Remember that volume increases with the cube of the radius.  Assuming the earth was shaped differently (fewer mountains) water would have to accumulate at a rate of more than 3 inches per *minute* for 40 days straight.  And that is if the highest mountain was only 15000 feet.  To flood today's earth it would take closer to 6 inches of rain per minute.  And that is over the WHOLE earth, not just some localized flash flood.
2. And where did all this water come from?
3. Where did the water go?  (Can we say water cycle here?)
4. How is it possible that two of every kind of animal (and seven of every clean beast) could fit on an ark.
5. Maybe he left some animals off the boat.  But then where do we get the sheer diversity of animals on the earth in the last 5000 years?  Even evolution cannot provide for so many creatures in such a short time.
6. What about the animal food?
7. What about the animal poo?
8. What about the diversity of the human race?  All from eight people now.
7. Why did the patriarchs live for so long? 400-800 years was a 'normal' lifespan.  Two hundred years ago, 60 years was a long life.  Now with medical and scientific advances, we might push that out to 90 for me.  I know a lot of good Mormons who have never touched tea, coffee, alcohol, etc., and are not headed toward that 200-400 year life-span that Brigham Young was talking about.  How did they live so long?
8. The God of The Old Testament was a very vengeful, jealous, racist God.  He said so himself.  He showed it with his actions:  merciless genocide, striking people down, sending plagues, floods, requiring human and animal sacrifice.  Is this really the same God as the 'Love they neighbor as thyself' God of The New Testament?
9. Either the title High Priest means something different in the Old and New Testaments than it does in the restored church because otherwise the children of Israel never did really have to live without the Melchizedek priesthood (as was taught to me in my youth.)  And the sealing/binding powers that were restored via Elijah?  He must have had the higher priesthood because that is not Aaronic stuff.  Along these lines, they had the Melchizedek priesthood in the Book of Mormon so they must have just gotten it from Lehi while they were still in Jerusalem then, right?

I probably had other questions too, but I can't remember them all right now.  But that was a good start.  The problem with many of those questions was that as I tried to answer them, the answers I found only brought up more questions.  I was starting to feel the shelf getting heavier.  But I stayed strong.