Hey Abby,
I'm not sure that you're right about the "no wiggle room". Both of the verses you cite are quite specific about the Flud being designed to wipe out all the LAND animals - including insects, by this definition.
"...which was upon the
face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the
creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven;..."
and
"...men and animals and the creatures that
move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth..."
However, that still leaves 4-5 million
species, mostly insects, unaccounted for - call it 8-10 up to 35 million individual specimens depending on how you calculate which were clean or unclean (I wonder if marsupials were clean or unclean? They're not mentioned anywhere as one of the biblical kinds). In addition, the passages completely beg the sea life question (my guess is the goat herders that penned this thing thought if it swims, it must have been okay in a Flud), not to mention parasites, various disease organisms, virii, prions etc etc that would have had to be on the ark itself along with the animals. The problem is much more complicated than a simple space calculation.
Creationists either have to agree to a incredibly high speciation rate post-Flud (I once calculated something like 1200 speciation events per year since Noah & co. set foot on Ararat just to account for the living species, not including all the extinct ones) with each generation producing massive phenotypical change (within a "kind" no less
) in a true chicken from a lizard's egg form OR decide that the Ark was the size of a small continent. You should read Morris's "The Genesis Flood" (Baker Book House, 1979). It's great high comedy seeing the founder of modern "scientific (sic) creationism" wiggle about trying to solve these issues.
Anyway, my point is the verses themeselves aren't the problem. You can graciously grant the creationists their interpretation, and then shred the entire idea just by looking at modern biodiversity and asking how it got there in 4500 years...