The story of Noah's Ark might need a better theodicy

Lately I’ve been thinking about the moral problems that the Bible often presents. When this topic comes up, the first thing that comes to mind is God’s command to kill the Canaanite children, and although many apologists like William Lane Craig have tried to argue that such an act was morally correct, the most adequate response is to affirm that the text is a hyperbole that does not imply that children actually died in the conquest.

However, that problem can be transferred to the flood that occurred in the time of Noah, and although it can also be applied to other cases (such as the death of David’s newborn son or Sodom and Gomorrah), this is simply the clearest example that comes to mind.

I want to carry out a process that I like to call “evaluation of theodicies under restricted conditions.” I’ve been thinking about this and I cannot find any that are truly satisfactory, and many of them simply seem like attempts to avoid facing the real problem and to downplay it. I would be especially interested in hearing new responses or stronger versions of existing ones, because so far none seem successful to me.

First, I want to clarify the framework I am assuming in order to avoid answers that change the playing field.

1. The flood in the Book of Genesis corresponds to a real historical event (although possibly regional rather than global).

2. The event was caused or intentionally brought about by God.

3. God is morally perfect and omnipotent.

4. The flood was carried out as a punishment for human beings.

5. Children below a certain age do not have full moral responsibility, and therefore are not guilty of wrongdoing.

6. No one who is morally upright would want to kill innocent children when there is a way to avoid it.

Under these conditions, I am evaluating theodicies with a very specific criterion: is the flood morally justifiable?

The focus of this post is on children because it is easier to empathize with children than with animals or plants, since although they share innocence, there is debate about whether they have souls, suffer, or even consent to death, but the argument could also be extended to them.

With that framework in mind, these are the main options I have considered and why I find them insufficient:

1. There were no children in that society. I heard this option from IP, and although it may sound plausible at first, it collapses almost immediately. It is argued that the society was so corrupt that children had already been killed by adults. However, this solution creates more problems than it solves. To begin with, it is biologically implausible, since all societies have children, and even if there were none at the moment Noah began building the ark, there would certainly have been some before he finished building it, a process that likely took at least a generation (since we have no biblical evidence that the construction of the ark was miraculously accelerated). Moreover, it seems designed exclusively to avoid the problem, which makes it an ad hoc solution. And finally, if there were no children, the society would eventually go extinct anyway, so there would be no point in sending a flood in the first place.

2. There were children, but they survived (for example, by entering the ark without being mentioned). This also seems unsustainable. The narrative is quite explicit about who survives, and adding unmentioned survivors is not only introducing external information without justification, but also forces us to contradict the literal reading of 1 Peter 3:20, which explicitly says that 8 souls entered the ark. It also creates problems in explaining how much space those children would occupy inside the ark (if it is already difficult to account for the space taken by animals, this makes it worse). Even if we propose that they survived miraculously outside the ark, we would still need to explain why this is not mentioned in the text and why the same did not happen for Noah and his family.

So I would like to add a seventh restriction for the following theodicies: innocent children died during the flood.

3. The children went to heaven or received a positive eternal destiny. Although this may have pastoral value, philosophically it does not address the problem. The issue is not only the final outcome, but the justice of causing their death. Saying that it “ends well” does not justify the means, and in other contexts we would consider that morally problematic. For example, I cannot go around killing infants “because they will go to heaven” and claim that it is good, since I am taking away another good, which is life on earth.

4. God can give and take life as He wishes. This argument tries to resolve the problem by appealing to God’s authority, but it does not explain why a specific action would be morally good. Moreover, it risks falling into moral voluntarism (what is good = what God does). If used without nuance, it seems to reduce morality to pure will, which raises serious problems in metaethics.

5. God is not judging isolated individuals, but a completely corrupt social structure. This helps explain why the judgment is so broad, but it does not address the case of children. They are not responsible for that structure, so the problem is simply shifted: now it becomes why innocents suffer in a collective judgment. This is similar to what some dictators have done, punishing entire populations for the wrongdoing of others, which is explicitly condemned in Ezekiel 18:20, Proverbs 17:26, and Genesis 18:25.

6. Second-order goods (John Hick). While it is true that a world with stable natural laws and real conditions for moral development implies that innocents sometimes suffer (because there would be no compassion without suffering), the problem here is that the flood does not seem to be an ordinary case of natural evil, but a direct divine intervention. If God is already intervening, the argument of not intervening to preserve the natural order loses much of its force. There are clear differences between a scenario where God allows evils like people dying of hunger and one where God directly kills innocent people without any chance of escape.

7. The distinction between macro and micro intervention. God can intervene in large historical events, but cannot be constantly making selective rescues without altering the moral structure of the world. This is quite vulnerable. It is not clear why rescuing children in this particular case would cause such a collapse of the moral system. It seems like a somewhat arbitrary limitation rather than a good theodicy.

8. Saving the children would produce a greater evil than ending their lives. This is probably the most promising in theory, but in practice it becomes very speculative. What specific greater evil is avoided? Without a concrete answer, this option remains incomplete. In fact, it seems quite the opposite. If the children had survived, it would facilitate the survival of the species with more people who could grow and reproduce, there would be more labor, etc. Saying that the children would grow up to be like their parents is pure speculation, and we have reasons to think that this would probably not be the case if they were raised by Noah, who would have taken on that responsibility if God had instructed him to do so. Not to mention that God had sufficient time and power to prepare a way to save them from death.

9. The death in the flood is simply an “shortening of life.” This is an idea that appears in some contemporary defenses, such as those by Paul Copan or Matthew Flannagan. The problem is that this does not address the moral difference between dying naturally and dying in a catastrophe that is intentionally caused. Saying that life would end anyway and that God merely accelerated the process is no different from a case in which I do the same, killing someone and saying that I merely shortened their life rather than ended it.

10. God did not directly cause the flood but withdrew His protection from an already imminent natural disaster. This may seem as if it softens the problem, but it does not. The problem does not disappear depending on the means God used to bring about the flood. He could use second-order miracles (events that occur naturally where the miraculous element is the timing, like the earthquake in Acts 16:26) or first-order miracles. The issue is whether God could have prevented the death of the children and did not do so. If the answer is yes, the moral question remains.

With all of this, the core problem remains the same: if God is perfectly good and had the ability to save the children (which would generate goods such as a larger population or their own continued existence), it seems that He should have done so. And yet, the narrative does not suggest that He did.

My impression so far is that, under these assumptions, no standard theodicy fully resolves the case. Some reduce the tension, but do not eliminate it. So I would like to ask: does anyone know of a theodicy that is not on this list, or a more developed version of one of these that can directly address this specific point about children?

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