Why I don't (and, indeed, can't) accept the story of Noah's Ark as any sort of fact; and why I'm astonished that many educated adults consider it to be history and not mythology.
For me, it is one of the least believable parts of the entire Bible, and any theist who attempts to use it to convert someone will have a hard job on their hands.
Let's look at it: Noah (at the ripe old age of 600!) and his sons built, using their bare hands, a seagoing vessel large enough to comfortably house a breeding pair of every land animal on the planet (although the bible isn't clear on this; in one place it says a pair of each creature, a few verses away it says seven of each clean, and two of each unclean creature (how did Noah know if tigers, kangaroos and penguins are clean or unclean?)), for at least forty days.
Okay, so what are the problems with this :-
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 (someone on alt.atheism suggested 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.
Where did Noah find the pitch to waterproof the Ark with? Flood theorists say that all the world's oil / petroleum deposits were formed during the Flood. How could Noah find and use pitch to waterproof the Ark before the Flood, when the pitch was formed during the Flood? Did he have SCUBA gear as well, and kept diving down to gather fresh pitch from the ocean floor and apply it to the Ark while it was floating around? Pitch is a petroleum deposit, which takes more than a couple of thousand years to form. (Some people argue that "wood-pitch" was used instead, although the commonly held belief is that it was petroleum-pitch).
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 (some of these have been suggested by readers of this page):
1.)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...
2.)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.
3.)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.
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. 1,082,696,932,000km³, or 1,080 billion cubic kilometers.
The volume of the earth to the height of Everest is 1,087,190,293,000km³
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 r³, 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.
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?
© Adrian Barnett 1997,1998,1999, 2000 Last updated 27th June 2000A r
