Jeff's Lunchbreak

Over the past few week's I've heard a few conversations of people discussing Noah's Ark like it actually happened. Now, I know that Biblical literalists are out there, and I even knew that some of those people I overheard were of that bent, but it's always a bit jarring to here people seriously discussing something so obviously untrue.

I've mentioned Noah's Ark on this site a few times, but always in passing. I thought it might be fun to put together a blog post explaining why it couldn't have happened. But then I started looking around on the Internet a little, and there are already fairly comprehensive pages and articles dedicated to debunking the flood myth. So anything I wrote would just be duplicating work that's already been done. So instead, I decided to provide links and highlights to a few of those already existing discussions of Noah's Ark, with just a little bit of my own commentary.

The myth of Noah's Ark breaks down on so many levels, that it's hard to believe that people take it seriously as a literal story. First, there's the implausibility of building a wooden ship that big to begin with. Then there's the problem of gathering all those animals to Noah's location (how did the sloths get there). Then Noah had to somehow fit all the animals aboard, along with all the food, water, and other supplies that would have been required. And for the entire time they were on the ark, a crew of 8 were all that were available to care for all those thousands and thousands of animals (just look at the staffs modern zoos require). Then once the flood was over, there's the little problem of getting all the animals back to where they belonged. (Why did most of the marsupials head straight to Australia? And how did the kangaroos cross the Pacific to get there?) And on top of that is the problem of re-population without inbreeding, and without the predators eating the only remaining specimens of those now endangered animals. And the story totally ignores plants and non-land animals. (Freshwater fish can't survive in salty conditions, and vice versa.)

But all that's granting some plausibility to a global flood happening in the first place. In reality, there's just no evidence that such a flood happened, especially in the time-frame that Biblical literalists claim. And there's no known mechanism by which it could have happened, even if every last speck of ice on the planet was melted (sorry Kevin Costner).

Ignoring all the previous objections, what would such an occurrence say about God's character? Actually, I wrote a bit about this in a previous entry of mine, Friday Bible Blogging - Genesis 1 to Genesis 10.

Children's books show Noah, his family, and the elephants and giraffes surviving happily on their boat. But just stop and imagine if something like this had actually happened. Think of all the newborn babies, toddlers, precocious seven year olds, expectant mothers, new mothers, proud fathers, newlyweds. Think of the puppies and kittens and baby koalas and cute cuddly polar bear cubs. Think of the hawks and eagles and their fledgling chicks. Think of the ants, and frogs, and freshwater fish. Think of all the life on the entire planet save one boatload full. And now think of them watching the floodwaters come, the fear they felt as they kept climbing to higher ground, wondering when the rising waters would stop. The terror when they finally realized that the waters were going to swallow them, and there was nothing they could do about it. The desperation of trying to save their children, of looking for something, anything, to keep them afloat and keep them from drowning.

And finally, Noah's Ark isn't even an original legend. It's just a retelling of the Mesopotamian Flood Myth, common to many cultures of that era.

Okay, let's move on to linking to other websites like I said I was going to do, which will also address a few of the specifics from above.

Talk Origins - Problems with a Global Flood

This is probably one of the best online resources on the subject. Just to show what it covers, here's the index from the page:

1. Building the Ark
2. Gathering the Animals
3. Fitting the Animals Aboard
4. Caring for the Animals
5. The Flood Itself
6. Implications of a Flood
7. Producing the Geological Record
8. Species Survival and Post-Flood Ecology
9. Species Distribution and Diversity
10. Historical Aspects
11. Logical, Philosophical, and Theological Points
Acknowledgements

The first two of those points are only covered briefly, but the rest are covered pretty well. It's not a book length thesis, but it's enough detail to show the implausibility of it all.

Here are a few short excerpts.

What is a kind? Creationists themselves can't decide on an answer to this question; they propose criteria ranging from species to order, and I have even seen an entire kingdom (bacteria) suggested as a single kind.

Were dinosaurs and other extinct animals on the ark? According to the Bible, Noah took samples of all animals alive at the time of the Flood. If, as creationists claim, all fossil-bearing strata were deposited by the Flood, then all the animals which became fossils were alive then. Therefore all extinct land animals had representatives aboard the ark.

Fresh foods. Many animals require their food to be fresh. Many snakes, for example, will eat only live foods (or at least warm and moving). Parasitoid wasps only attack living prey. Most spiders locate their prey by the vibrations it produces. Most herbivorous insects require fresh food. Aphids, in fact, are physically incapable of sucking from wilted leaves.

Talk Origins - Review of John Woodmorappe's "Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study"

This article is a review / refutation of a creationist book attempting to show that the flood myth was plausible. By being a direct response to creationist arguments, it shows just how strained those arguments are. Here are a few excerpts from this page.

Woodmorappe attempts to solve the feeding and care problems by comparing the ark to modern mass production farming methods. But there is no justification given to approaching the problem in this fashion. It is not clear that solutions applicable to the care of 8,000 hogs, requiring the same food, water and space, can be applied to 8,000 different animals each requiring a different set of food, water and environmental conditions. Every care and feeding problem is attacked by this approach. And yet he suggests that some of the snakes can be coaxed into eating inert food by stuffing snake skins with meat. He notes that pandas can survive on diets lacking bamboo, but a check of the references shows that the replacement diet is more time-consuming to create than bamboo. This type of feeding is precisely why so many have wondered whether Noah and company had sufficient time to feed thousands of animals.

Woodmorappe states (p. 27) that the urine could be drained overboard by gravity. He does not tell how this is possible from the lowest floor level which was below the water line. At one point he suggests that the animals could be trained to urinate and defecate upon command while someone holds a bucket behind the animal. Assuming that this can be accomplished for the largest quarter of the animals and that they need to be serviced three times per day, each person must service 125 animals per hour, 2 animals a minute. What a fun job that must have been.

Animals outside of the ark were supposed to have survived in pockets of floodwater suitable to their requirements (whatever those requirements were). He appeals to gradual acclimatization of amphibians and fish to the salinity of the flood waters. But exactly how a global flood was able to gradually occur is unexplained. He has plankton be buried and then re-excavated to survive the flood.

EvoWiki - Noah's Ark

This was a short entry looking at the displacement of the ark, and whether it would have even been possible for it to carry what creationists claim. They even generously granted the assumptions of the creationist, John Woodmorappe, about a reduced species count on the ark (allowing many animals to have somehow survived without being on the ark, and necessitating a type of 'hyper' evolution after the flood waters receded to generate the current biodiversity), and the food requirements of those animals. Here's the takeaway.

Exactly how does a vessel whose displacement must have been less than 45,000 tons, manage to carry cargo and animals whose aggregate weight is more than 70,000 tons?

As a side note to the above, here's a discussion of the largest wooden ship, which included a link to the following picture:

Those ships were some of the biggest wooden ships every built, and they were only on the order of 5,000 tons. And they had the advantage of modern materials like steel in addition to the wood.

ReligiousTolerance.org - Noah's ark and the flood: Comparison of the Babylonian and Noachian flood stories

This article describes how similar the Noah's Ark story is to another Mesopotamian flood myth. Here's the introduction, describing the other flood myth.

The Chaldean Flood Tablets from the city of Ur in what is now Southern Iraq contain a story that describes how the Bablylonian god Enlil had been bothered by the incessant noise generated by humans. He convinced the other gods to completely exterminate every person on Earth as well as land animals and birds with a great flood. One of the gods, Ea, went against the decision of the rest of the gods, and told Ut-Napishtim to build an ark to save a few humans, and some animals.

How Stuff Works - Could Noah's ark really have happened?

This is a little less specialized site than most of those linked above. But they still point out the obvious.

Before we dive into the question of whether Noah and his ark existed, let's first ask if there's any evidence of ancient worldwide flooding. Scientifically speaking, such a flood would be impossible. It would take more than five times the amount of water in the oceans and atmosphere to submerge the earth up to its mountaintops. And if that amount of water entered the atmosphere, the resulting pressure would crush people's lungs.

This article does discuss a possible historical basis for the legend - local flooding of that particular region.

Here's where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers come into play. The two waterways that slice through modern day Iraq served as the main thoroughfares for trade at that time, and were the setting for the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Because both rivers flood each summer, scholars think that Noah's story may be based on that actual event -- a greater than usual flooding of the Tigris or Euphrates. In fact, archeologists have uncovered evidence of such a great flood in Mesopotamia, dating back to around 2900 B.C., that quickly wiped out a number of Sumerian cities.

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Well, for an entry I was expecting to be rather short, this grew longer than I expected. I guess it's just that there are so many problems with the Noah's Ark legend. Like I wrote above, it's hard to believe that people take it seriously as a literal story.