I disagree with Dinosaurs were aboard the Ark.
Why? Because I don't beleive the Ark could ever have PHYSICALLY existed.
This boat would have had to have been bigger than a super-tanker.
There are MILLIONS of species on the land. There are over three hundred and fifty thousand species of beetle alone. The sheer number of insects would fill several arks, before you even consider the larger creatures. The ark would have to be the single largest ship ever in the history of the world. Modern technology could not possibly create a ship large and stable enough to act as Noah's Ark. Infact, so large would this mythical Ark have to be, that Noah would have needed a space-suit to walk on the deck.
Many species of land animal require highly specialised habitat and food to survive. Koala bears, for instance, eat one kilogram of fresh Eucalyptus- tree leaves per day, which provide all their water and nutrition (some people have suggested Noah had a year's supply of dried Euc. leaves. But Koalas need the leaves for their water. What did Noah do? Rehydrate them? With what, a desalination plant? Hold them out in the rain every morning?) Also, no matter what time of year it was, many creatures would be hibernating (it's always winter somewhere on the globe). Many creatures are only found on one continent, indeed some are limited to a small island/forest/mountain. It's a neat trick to be able to walk thousands of miles to the Middle East if you're hibernating on a remote island near Alaska. How could the ark cope with all the specialised requirements of food/environment for millions of creatures? The 320 different species of humming-bird, for example, have very high metabolic rates and have to consume large amounts of nectar throughout the day. The Ark would have had to cater for 640 humming-birds, requiring an almost constant supply of fresh nectar. From flowers. Which wouldn't grow in great abundance in a dark, damp boat.
How could the ark cope with disposing of the waste products of those creatures? It must have had an incredibly advanced plumbing and ventilation system, superior to anything to be found on modern ocean liners or large military vessels (eg. aircraft carriers). One problem that dairy farmers have is that vast quantities of fresh dung produce highly toxic gases (falling into the slurry pit can be fatal because of this), and it would have been many times worse on an Ark. Next time you are at a zoo, ask one of the keepers how easy it is to deal with the needs of the few hundred animals they have for a month, and then imagine scaling that up to a gigantic floating zoo with millions of creatures being looked after by one old man and his family.
Using modern equipment, it can take a good shipyard years to build a large ship, using hundreds of men. Noah (five hundred years old at the time) apparently had himself, a few helpers and a lot of gopher-wood trees. We are expected to believe that he built the Ark, using crude hand-tools, over a period of many years in a world filled with evil, scheming criminals. ("The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.")
Here are a few of the things he would have had to deal with:
-Wood rotting. Left out in the open, the partly-built Ark would be exposed to the elements, such as rain, wind, lightning (a large structure is likely to get struck quite often, and wood burns), fungus, termites and ravenous beavers (well, maybe not beavers). Maybe he first built a huge hangar in which he could construct it safely? That would have almost as great an enterprise as the Ark itself! Unfortunately, the Bible does not enlighten us as to the whereabouts of Noah's Shed. I guess it was washed away in the Flood...
-Theft and vandalism. The hordes of fiendish deviants living around Noah at the time would no doubt have had enjoyed enormous sinful fun by sabotaging the Ark, stealing the wood for themselves (why cut and prepare your own wood when Noah's done the job for you?) and harassing the few workers.
-Sag. Modern shipyards build large ships from metal, as wooden ships beyond a certain size simply cannot support their own weight out of water. Either Noah had access to some amazing technology unknown to us, or the size of the Ark is somewhat exaggerated.
Then we come to the flood itself. The bible states that all mountains were covered, until they were about twenty feet below water. This also rules out the idea that it was somehow a local flood, confined to the Middle East (the most bizarre explanation I have heard along these lines is that Mars came close to the Earth, and it's gravitational pull raised up a dome of water in the region. The problems with this are too many to even think about.)
Some people might find it a little odd that God, omnipotent being who can create entire galaxies in an instant, takes weeks and weeks to flood the planet. Perhaps water is a bit fiddly to create?
How much water was there?
And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
Over the top of Mt. Everest then? The volume of water would have been astronomical. Millions of cubic miles. Where did it come from? Where did it go? The polar ice-caps are not big enough. The atmosphere does not contain millions of cubic miles of water.
Using a bit of armchair maths, we can roughly calculate how much water would have been needed to cover the planet to the top of Mt. Everest:
The radius of the Earth is approx. 6370km
The height of Everest above sea-level is approx. 8.8 km
Therefore, the volume of the Earth is approx. 1,082,696,932,000km?, or 1,080 billion cubic kilometers.
The volume of the earth to the height of Everest is 1,087,190,293,000km?
Subtracting the first volume from the second gives approx. 4,493,361,000, or four thousand, five hundred million cubic kilometers of water!
Also, this rain is supposed to have fallen within about 40 days. That means that there would have been about 220 metres of rainfall every day over the entire planet (8800/40 = 220)! A few centimetres in a day is considered to be extremely heavy rain.
( Note: volume of sphere = 4/3 pi r?, and I use the American billion of 1,000,000,000 here )
Many Ark-theorists claim that scale models of the Ark have been built according to the Biblical specifications, and found to be extremely sea-worthy in test-tanks. I hope that these tests also attempted to simulate the correct amount of rainfall by aiming several high-pressure fire-hoses directly at the model.
Assuming it was fresh water (as it rained) this would have severely diluted the oceans, causing devastation among the marine creatures. Ask anyone with a marine fish-tank just how sensitive reef-fish and corals are to changes in water conditions. Virtually all sea-life that could not stand brackish water would have been destroyed.
How did so many plants survive being submerged in brackish water for so long? Again, many plants are quite sensitive to conditions. Take some of your household plants and leave them submerged in the bath or a pond for a year and see how they do.
Then, after the waters subside (where to?) there are still more problems with the story. What happened to all the corpses of the countless numbers of animals and humans that died? Surely there would have been terrible plague and disease caused by all that rotting meat.
Many sea-creatures would have been deposited in places they could not normally reach - inland lakes etc. Is there any evidence of marine fish skeletons being found in high, freshwater lake beds?
One imaginative way of explaining away the water is that the Earth was a lot flatter back then - the mountains were very low and the seas very shallow. After the Flood, God raised the mountains and sank the ocean floors, reducing the land area and creating space for the water to drain away to. As usual, there is no evidence to support this notion, and it also raises more questions.
For example, how did the deep-ocean sea creatures come about? There are plenty of fish than can only survive at the great pressures on the ocean bottoms, the abyssal plains. These could not have existed before the Flood, as the oceans were apparently too shallow. Maybe they evolved after the Flood (in an incredibly short time)? Maybe Satan created them (after all, they are all really ugly with lots of teeth)? Funny how creationists use evolution (and other branches of science) when it suits them, but denounce it as Satanic Lies the rest of the time...
Many claims are made for sighting of the remains of the Ark in the mountains of Turkey. These Ark-pieces are supposed to be about nine thousand feet up the side of one precipitous mountain or another (usually Ararat). Now, these mountains are not gently rolling hills. They're huge great things covered with snow and full of jagged crevices. The mountain-goats, birds and flying squirrels could have probably got down safely (as long as they didn't freeze or starve on the way), but elephants, penguins, camels and crocodiles are not noted for their natural mountaineering ability.
Next, I have to ask how all the creatures managed to get back to their original habitats, or at least ones that would support them.
How did the koalas and kangaroos get back to Australia?
How did the polar bears and penguins get back the north/south poles?
How did the giant tortoises get back to the Galapagos islands?
How did the flightless dodos get back to Mauritius?
How did the army ants get back to the Amazon rain-forests?
As there were only two (or seven, depending) of each species, how did they manage to travel thousands of miles back to their place of origin without being eaten, dying in accidents or of starving to death due to lack of their normal (specialised) food supply?
Of course, not all the animals were able to get away. According to Genesis 8:20 Noah immediately sacrificed at least one of each pair of clean animal! That could have potentially been a lot of animals. Seems a bit pointless, really. After all, God told him to build the Ark - it would appear to be rather unnecessary to thank God afterwards for looking after the Ark, and thanking God by slaughtering His creations and producing a huge pile of bloody corpses seems a little odd... So, that's the "clean" breeding pairs ruined (or reduced considerably if there were seven). Unless of course they were breeding/pregnant during the voyage. But then, how did the Ark cope with all the extra mouths to feed?
Some creationists have come up with quite remarkably imaginative explanations as to how Noah managed to gather and store all the animals in a restricted space. A couple of the more interesting ones I've come across are:
He did not take adult animals, but eggs, babies and infants.
Presumably then, the creatures arrived at the Ark of their own accord, laid eggs or gave birth, and left poor old Noah to cope with the mess and figure out the best way to tend to the needs of the newborn tiger, chicken or tarantula. Exactly who got the job of producing all the gallons of milk for the young mammals is not explained.
He did not even gather babies and eggs, but sperm and ova (egg eggs, if you will).
The difficulties that this situation raises are best left to the imagination, and should probably not be brought up as a topic of conversation at the dinner table, or in front of sensitive Aunts.
Many of the animals hibernated, or went into some sort of suspended animation.
As mentioned above, how the already-hibernating beasties get there in the first place? Was this a natural form of hibernation (which requires the build-up of large fat reserves first), or some sort of miraculous state? How did the animals build up enough fat whilst walking thousands of miles to the Ark (which would be quite good exercise)? If it was all done with miracles, then why do creationists insist on explaining everything in naturalistic terms? Which is it? Magic or mundane?
Some of the "animals" that are usually left out of the story are microorganisms (germs, bacteria, disease-bugs and so on). Many bacteria, viruses and parasites spend their entire life-cycles within a specific host species. This means that all the humans, plants and animals on the Ark would have had to be carriers for all the species-specific diseases that we have today (presumably, someone on the Ark carried HIV/AIDS, someone else had hepatitis, and another had several strains of influenza). The Ark would have been a gigantic, disease-ridden plague-ship. Of course, maybe all modern diseases turbo-evolved after the Flood subsided (like the beetles : see below) - which makes you wonder how the surviving creatures managed to survive long enough to populate the world at all...
So, next time someone who doesn't accept evolution asks you where AIDS came from, pick up your Bible and turn to Genesis... Noah had it in his pocket!
Once Noah had seen all the animals off, he then had to set about repopulating the world. Again, incest in the bible rears it's ugly head. Noah's family had to inbreed to have children. Sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, first cousins and first cousins (as Noah's sons had their wives with them - eight people altogether) all nicely mixed together (just as an aside, as all people before Noah were now dead, how does anyone know if the other events in the O.T. are true? We only have Noah's word for it, surely?). The human race effectively began again with Noah & co.
Makes you wonder why the omniscient God even bothered with Adam & Eve. Why not start straight away with Noah?
It's also interesting to note that after the Flood, one of the first things the pure and virtuous Noah did was to make some wine, get drunk and roll around naked (Gen 9:21). Well, I suppose sailors always like to unwind a little after a long sea voyage...
Whilst discussing the Ark story with a Jehovah's Witness, the subject of the rainbow cropped up. According to the Bible, God placed a rainbow in the sky after the flood, presumably to brighten the place up a bit, what with all the mud and dead animals etc.
I asked if that was the first rainbow ever to be seen, and she said yes, it was. This raises some fairly major questions:
Were the laws of physical optics changed that day? They must have been, as rainbows are extremely simple phenomena.
How did light refract through water before that?
Did the eyes of all creatures have to change also?
How did we see colour before that?
Rainbows only form during rain. In the Bible, the rainbow appears several months after the rains have stopped and the waters have drained away. So was this a real rainbow, or a magical rainbow that needs neither sun nor rain?
She couldn't really answer this, but (after talking to other JWs) came up with this : "There was no rain before the flood, just very heavy dew each day."
[ Exercise for the reader : roll on the floor with your legs in the air, laughing like a hyena on giggle-drugs. ]
This is an area that causes problems for Flood-theorists. They usually state that the dinosaur bones we find today are the remains of the dinosaurs that died during the Flood.
But why didn't Noah take any of these dinosaurs on the Ark? The Bible says he took two of EVERY LAND ANIMAL (and if dinosaurs were "clean", seven of each). Dinosaurs surely fit into this category, do they not?
Also, if the fossil record was indeed created during the flood, then why do we consistently find that the lower down you go, the smaller the fossils become?
If you take a large tank of water, and empty a big bucket of assorted stones (ranging in size from silt and sand up to large rocks) into it, you will notice that the BIG ONES SINK FIRST, with the fine silt and sand settling on top. If the fossil record was created during the flood, surely we should see large bones in the lower strata, and the smallest ones higher up.
What we actually find is the exact opposite, which directly contradicts this part of the Flood hypothesis and supports the evolutionary view.
If all the land animals died during the flood, we would expect the fossil record to be a hopelessly jumbled mess, with human bones being mixed up with dinosaur bones and Trilobites. What we actually find is a neatly layered set of strata that appear to be in chronological order, showing the evolutionary development from early, simple creatures up to modern, complex creatures. Also, creatures of approximately similar size, shape and weight should (according to the Creation theory) sink at about the same rate. Why aren't dog skeletons mixed in with Compsognathus? Why aren't elephants mixed in with Stegosaurus? Why isn't pollen mixed all the way through, instead of starting at the strata containing flowers? Could it be that they were not all alive at the same time?
If anyone can explain how this could have happened, I'd be intrigued to find out.
Maybe the small animals all drowned and sank first, while the larger creatures were able to float about a bit before sinking? Can you imagine that?!? Noah looks over the side of the Ark to see ants, dogs, cows, T. Rex, Moas etc. all treading water, and disappearing in order of size...
This seems an incredibly complex way to go about ridding the world of sinners, doesn't it? Not only that, it doesn't seem to have actually worked. If God intended to re-breed the human race from the pure and virtuous Noah, why do we see so much "sin" in the world today? Surely God would have foreseen the outcome? I suppose it could be argued that the troubles in the world today are as nothing compared with that in Noah's time, but I don't think the people around Noah had problems with drugs, schoolchildren with assault rifles, and weapons of mass destruction (apart from God, of course). If the world today is at least as bad as Noah's world, why did God bother? Maybe he cannot see the future?
God, who can create or destroy entire galaxies with no effort at all, has to get some poor slob to build an enormous ship, transport millions of animals from all over the planet to this ship, flood the entire planet, drain the water and then redistribute the animals again. What is the point? Why not just click his fingers and cause everything to be as he wishes it to be? Why go to the trouble of causing the terrible deaths by drowning of billions of animals, birds, insects and humans? This includes, of course, all those innocent babies and children who haven't had time to even start sinning yet.
Drowning babies... Quite odd behaviour for an all-powerful, infinitely compassionate God, is it not? Heck, I suppose God knew they were going to grow up into sinners and decided to get rid of them early. Of course, as they hadn't actually sinned yet, they couldn't go to ****, so I suppose they must have gone to Heaven. But in that case, why did they deserve to have the life choked out of them by violent, muddy flood-waters? God does work in a mysterious way!
That is the problem, really. In order to accept Noah's Ark as fact, you must believe in God first. Without belief in God, it is just laughable. You're not going to convince many people to follow your religion by sitting them down and saying "Well, let me tell you this fascinating and factual story about a man, some animals and a big boat a few thousand years ago.". With total, unquestioning belief in God, it works, no matter how strange it seems, as you can just tell yourself "God sorted it out". To me, though, that just seems to be a huge cop-out.
If anyone can address the questions and issues I have laid out here, without using a blatant cop-out (e.g.. "God did it all, do not question His ways.") I would be happy to hear from you.
