The tale of Noah's Ark

I've been thinking about this funny tidbit in the bible called Noah's Ark again.

I'm sure most of you have heard of it. According to the old testament (Genesis 6-9), there was this old man called Noah (he was 600 years old, apparently) who haschatswith the Christian god. The god tells Noah to build a big boat, load his family on it and also collect pairs of all the animals in the world.

God has decided something has gone wrong and he's going to flood the world, killing off everyone except those on the boat, and start again.

Of course, it's coincidental that the Quran has a similar thing in it, and that the Epic of Gilgamesh (far older than the bible) also contains something like it.

A few things already spark up.

• God made a mistake and kills off everyone in the world to try again. So much for an infallible god. Even if there weren't billions of people on earth yet, he simply decides to kill a few million people (at least?). People whom he created 'in his own image'. Which shows me that this god is as fallible as a human. Or a human is a godly as the god he created.
• Noah was 600 years old. Science has shown that something like that isn't possible. The human body just doesn't support that.

So the earth is flooded. Everyone's dead. The boat floats around for a while. (150 days, after which thegodremembers (!) the people and the animals. He lets the water disappear (where to?), the boat stops on Mount Ararat (which hasn't been found yet) and things get well again.

More things spark up.

• Where did all these animals come from? Did penguins walk all the way from their cold areas to the boat? (Or didn't they exist yet?)
• Who fed all those animals during these 150 days? How big was that boat? If there were 2 elephants on board... they eat a lot...
• And who fed all those people?
• Also: who shovelled all the poop overboard?
• If old Noah and his family were the only surviving people on board, hasn't there been a lot of incest and inbreeding going on since they left the boat and populated the wholeworldagain?
• Did all the animals walk and fly back to where they came from? (There is no mention that Noah gave them a lift home...)

I also wonder where the boat people got their fresh water from, for themselves and all the animals. Remember: the waters of the earth merged into 1 world-encompassing ocean, so salt and sweet water became 1 big stream of brackish water. Hardly fit for consumption. Still, they survived for 150 days on their boat.

Which brings up two other questions:

1. Where did all the water come from to flood the earth?
2. Where did it go when god was satisfied with his mass murder?

There may be perfectly valid reasons for that in the Christian mind ("because god made it happen"), but they don't convince me...

The last thing that I really would like to know is: why did old man Noah have to sacrifice a dove to find land again? Remember, the first one didn't come back and the second one brought a twig. (He had 2 of each animal, so 2 doves. How did the remaining dove procreate??) A god worth the worship should have been able to point Noah in the right direction, right? Or was that a "test of faith"? How much more faith would a god need from old man Noah after building this über-titanic and floating around for 150 days in piss poor weather, waiting for the water to sink?

Just something I wonder about.