( Some Text Quoted From Bryan Prim at
http://www.the-archon.com )
First, Shall we start off with the supposed ark Noah built:
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.
Let us now examine the Idea of a Flood:
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 meters of rainfall every day over the entire planet (8800/40 = 220)! A few centimeters in a day is considered to be extremely heavy rain.
With the Rising of the ocean level, the air pressure would have increased to a level that would turn ordinary gasses like Nitrogen and Oxygen into deadly poisons. When rain falls it also causes heat, when it evaporates, it takes some of that heat away ( That's why it is cooler after it rains ) With all the rain falling, the earth's temperature woudl have risen to nearly 6000 degrees. Good luck trying to survive that!
Let us now examine the animals:
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 (specialized) 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?
Well then, What about the Dinosaurs?:
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...
Conclusion
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 behavior 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 Hell, 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! (See my Flood Story for one possible scenario)
I cannot imagine how anyone could give any credibility whatsoever to the story of Noah's Ark, it really does defy belief.
But then, of course, God can do anything, we should not attempt to understand him, and what he does do, he does in ways beyond our comprehension.
I don't think he could have come up with anything more mysteriously incomprehensible than the bizarre Ark story.
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.
-Special Thanks to Bryan Prim for the use of his fantastic articles!!
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