Noah's Ark volume calculation

Your paranoid side is showing. Trust me, scientists are not out to disprove religion. No one is funding research proposals to disprove creation ex nihilo, a miraculous origin of life, Noah's flood, or the burning bush.I know this site has a number of atheist members, but moderation of this site will not be antagonistic to religion, not if I have anything to say about it. I'm a deist myself and I run the joint.This site exists to promote science education, specifically to promote the teaching of genuine science in science class. Why don't we just stick to the topic of whether Noah's ark was big enough to get the job done.--Percy

Well, now you're just displaying more confusion. Your paranoid side is showing because you believe scientists are out to get your religion, which is what you said inMessage 250, that "Scientists have an agenda: to prove it can't happen." Scientists have no such agenda, which is why your paranoid side is showing.I again suggest you just stick to the topic about whether Noah's ark was big enough to get the job done.--Percy

The San Diego Zoo has 4000 animals (950 different species) and employs 1900 people. That's approximately 2 animals per person. If Noah's ark had 950 species then because of the extra pairs of clean animals 2000 animals would be a fair estimate. That's 250 animals per person, or more than 100 times the workload of employees at the San Diego Zoo. Granted Noah didn't have a payroll or scientists in residence or visitors and so forth, but you get the idea.Trucks carrying supplies for the animals arrive every day at the San Diego Zoo. Noah's ark would have had to carry enough supplies for the entire 9-month voyage.As discussed earlier in this thread using the example of sheep, because of the very narrow quarters and the stress from the noise and knocking about of transport, many animals will only survive for a short period of time such as a few days at most. After that mortality becomes an issue, so many animals on the ark would have required moving about space and very calm waters.Animals when stressed or frightened will often hurt themselves and others. Noah would have needed a medical officer equally expert with pandas and people. --Percy

Gator's adopting fish as friends? Would it surprise you to learn that most people probably think you're making this up? I can't even get my cats, a brother and sister pair, to tolerate each other much of the time, let alone other tasty animals that they've been exposed to since kitten-hood. Noah must have kept the small rodents in some very secure cages. Even when the cats aren't hungry and just want to play, for the mouse it's usually fatal. Same for snakes, they really love snakes!Of course there's always the food chain. Mice are food for cats are food for fishers and foxes and coyotes are food for bobcats etc. It's not like the predators think, "Oh, he's a predator, too, I'll leave him alone." With a predator you've got a problem with every animal small enough to be considered prey.Here's a short excerpt from About.com about keeping big cats as pets (Big Cats: Should Tigers and Lions Be Kept as Pets?): So getting back on-topic about whether the volume of Noah's ark was sufficient, it sounds like the larger predators would have required considerable space, and that it would have had to have been provided in a way so as to keep them from preying on smaller animals.Can you go through for us the process of estimation and calculation you would use to calculate the required volume of the ark?--PercyEdited by Percy, : Add missing close paren.

As gets pointed out in every thread where this comes up, including this one, the fundamental problem always turns out to be that there's no definition of "kind", with the result that there's no way to know how many animals were on the ark. Define "kind" too similarly to species and the ark is obviously not big enough, not even close. Define "kind" too close to higher levels of organization like family and order and you end up needing hyper-evolution in order to produce the huge variety of species we see today, which isn't the topic of this thread but which you obviously also want to avoid.I think you would be well advised to abandon the guesses from creationists and base your work upon information from the real world, like I suggested in my Message 284 about the San Diego zoo, which knows how to keep animals alive for not only months but years.You argue elsewhere that even if science cannot prove the ark happened, science also cannot prove it didn't happen. The reality is that science doesn't prove anything, it only supports hypotheses with evidence which when sufficiently confirmed may attain the status of accepted theory.Your argument equates to saying that just because there's no evidence in support of the flood hypothesis that that doesn't mean it didn't happen, which no one here would disagree with, but we're baffled why you find this comforting, because it groups your hypothesis with everything else that never happened. Like the cow jumping over the moon: no evidence, just like the flood. Like Pinocchio's nose growing when he lied: no evidence, just like the flood. Need I go on?--Percy

You can only avoid the problem by assuming that kind is equivalent to species. That would require the ark to carry something in the neighborhood of a million animals. If you can figure out how the ark could carry a million animals then no one will argue with you about your definition of kind, but can't we pretty much agree that the ark could never have carried a million animals?So you need a definition of kind that isn't equivalent to species, because otherwise you can't know how many animals you'll need room for. Defining kind is fundamental to the problem.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.