To Christians: Is there any evidence or reason to believe in the flood aside from the testimony in the Bible?

Is there any reason to take the Flood literally, rather than just count it as fiction? I've searched the internet, and the only pieces of evidence I have come across are...

-Seashell fossils at the top of mountains. Easily explainable when you realize that billions of years ago, those mountains didn't exist, and the Earth was covered in water. Sea shells could have easily fossilized and been brought to the top of the mountains.

-Many civilizations have a flood story. We can operate under the assumption that every single successful civilization in history was located near and had access to a very large source of water. Naturally, almost every large source of water floods during different times in the year. If every Flood story told of a man in an ark taking 2 of every animal, then I would be impressed. They do not.

-The Grand Canyon. This is mostly just speculation, and isn't backed up by any sort of scientific evidence or observations.

But here are the points about the Flood that I would like to be explained by Christianity.

-The distribution of animals. What we can infer is that after the flood, every single living creature on Earth was exiting the ark at the top of Mt. Ararat. What we find is that nearly every species made a mad dash for their current location, leaving behind no evidence of their travels and no descendents of the ark animals ever stopped to inhabit equally satisfactory environments. Examples would be lemurs, which only exist in Madagascar, or penguins, which somehow crossed many miles of completely uninhabitable land to reach the arctic. Obviously thousands of examples could be listed here.

-How did freshwater fish survive if the flood was salt water, or vice versa?

-How did plants survive the flood? Were they also taken on the ark? There is absolutely no chance that most modern plants could have survived being submerged in enormous amounts of water for a long period of time, especially salt water.

-How did a wooden ark survive the rain volume? If the water covered the Earth in 40 days, we are looking at about 8000 inches per hour. The force of that much water on the ark would easily destroy it.

-Who wrote it down? Using the civilization argument for the flood, we can assume that every civilization except the one from which Noah originated went extinct from the flood. Who recorded the flood myths in these civilizations? Logically, smaller floods of local water sources explains the flood myths of primitive civilizations, not Noah's flood.

sorry if that was somewhat incoherent. I'm pretty severely jetlagged from a business trip. I just can't understand how an objective examination of the flood couldn't lead any rational human being to think that it is simply a myth, and not fact.

EDIT: Also, I am aware of less conservative derivatives of Christianity that do not take the flood and Eden myths literally. However, I was raised in an enormously conservative family and church, and was constantly told about the incorrect age of the Earth (6000 years), and how the flood and Adam and Eve actually happened. This thread is mainly aimed at these more conservative Christians that focus on literal interpretations. In particular, I was Church of Christ, so I'd be interested in seeing what any COC users have to say about it.