Speciation

In The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins describes (pp. 268-270) his disbelief of how creationists can maintain their beliefs in light of the findings by Darwin on speciation.  I am continually annoyed when atheists and Christians alike leave no room for evolution in the argument.  By assuming that the claims of creation demand that all modern species be present on the ark is a self-defeating straw man argument.  Yet that's exactly what we find many (not all) atheists using as their definition of the creation story.  In this matter, I agree completely: it would be ridiculous to assume that all modern species were present on the ark at the time of the flood.  Evolution is not the theory in question; the span of time in which it occurred and the conditions from which it started are the only two variables worth debating in this great argument.

Additionally, Dawkins provides the answer to the problem that he proposes.  In fact, the creation story creates an arguably greater explanation of how we see species distributed in their modern settings.  If the ark contained, say, 20 fundamental species of mammals and those mammals were to disperse and become rapidly partitioned into the islands that he describes in the same chapter, evolution would take hold and maintain adaptive selection.  As he says, all of the great variety of African cichlids have evolved "before our very eyes" in the past 200 years.  How much more would lemurs, sheep, and whatever else you could imagine evolve to adapt in the span of 5000 years!  God gives the command to "go forth and multiply", and I doubt that the animals would have been any great exception.  While this leaves some vague room for divine intervention/ inspiration for the movement of the animals, we are already assuming that God has divinely acted to create the Flood in the first place.  There are, however, many issues that can be raised that seem to contradict a rapid-evolution theory:

1. The fossil record does not support such a worldview (unless rapid extinctions were to have occurred prior to the Flood and perhaps even in the Garden itself).
2. Radiometric dating (as Dawkins says earlier in the book) must have worked differently than it currently does, and we have no evidence for this being possible.  While it is not impossible assuming it could be attributable to some undiscovered process, all forms of radiometric decay would need to have been impacted on the same scale.  Indeed, if some global process were to stimulate rapid decay, this is what we would expect.
3. The continents would need to have been connected at some point.  Plate tectonics must have worked more rapidly than previously.  Again, dating methods directly contradict this idea.  However, the "freak events" that Dawkins describes could have lead to great dispersal/migration.
4. Abel was a shepherd.  He tended sheep.  I am curious to know the etymology of the Hebrew words used in the Genesis account, specifically whether the term "shepherd" could be more loosely applied to a tender grazing animals/livestock.  Assuming this is not the case, however, one must conclude that mammals existed at the same time as dinosaurs and that sheep have existed since the beginning of time (if Genesis is true).

Yet if these problems are to be resolved, the evolutionary forces that Dawkins describes as being at play in modern and ancient species would not need to be removed or explained away.  The Genesis account would sync well with the idea of rapid evolution, isolation, and dispersal.

As an aside, I've been keeping an eye on a certain Google Doc titled the "Dossier of Reason"-- a collection of arguments opposing the Bible from a variety of approaches including science, internal logic, and self-contradictions.  After browsing through several of the arguments, I have half a mind to sit down and thoroughly attempt to refute each one.  Many are illogical and seem to be based solely on a position of highest probability causality without taking into account human logic, error in the reasoning of the actors, and the ability to explain any of the superficial contradictions without being titled "warped logic" and "grasping at straws".  The problem is that this document is many, many pages long; to thoroughly treat each point would require a great deal of writing along with a bit of research (and perhaps even some contact of professors/experts).