About that Boat - Noah's Ark

Deleted by Q due to duplicate post.[This message has been edited by Quetzal, 08-26-2003]

Hee hee. No lie, amigo. I was on the USS Latrine (err, sorry Racine), a flat bottomed LST that's about as close to a barge as you're likely to get in the Navy. We caught just the teeniest edge of a typhoon in the East China Sea (the Latrine was playing trash hauler taking us from Okinawa to Korea for an exercise). The squids claimed she was taking green water on the bridge sponsons (60 feet above the waterline). I DO know she was taking 23 degree rolls, and digging her prow into the waves at least up over the clamshells. And a fun time was had by all. The world's largest roller coaster is tame - tame, I tell ya - by comparison. More like being inside a cement mixer on "high".

Hey Abby,I'm not sure that you're right about the "no wiggle room". Both of the verses you cite are quite specific about the Flud being designed to wipe out all the LAND animals - including insects, by this definition."...which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven;..."and"...men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth..."However, that still leaves 4-5 million species, mostly insects, unaccounted for - call it 8-10 up to 35 million individual specimens depending on how you calculate which were clean or unclean (I wonder if marsupials were clean or unclean? They're not mentioned anywhere as one of the biblical kinds). In addition, the passages completely beg the sea life question (my guess is the goat herders that penned this thing thought if it swims, it must have been okay in a Flud), not to mention parasites, various disease organisms, virii, prions etc etc that would have had to be on the ark itself along with the animals. The problem is much more complicated than a simple space calculation.Creationists either have to agree to a incredibly high speciation rate post-Flud (I once calculated something like 1200 speciation events per year since Noah & co. set foot on Ararat just to account for the living species, not including all the extinct ones) with each generation producing massive phenotypical change (within a "kind" no less ) in a true chicken from a lizard's egg form OR decide that the Ark was the size of a small continent. You should read Morris's "The Genesis Flood" (Baker Book House, 1979). It's great high comedy seeing the founder of modern "scientific (sic) creationism" wiggle about trying to solve these issues.Anyway, my point is the verses themeselves aren't the problem. You can graciously grant the creationists their interpretation, and then shred the entire idea just by looking at modern biodiversity and asking how it got there in 4500 years...

Yeah, but the creationists can (rightly, IMO), point out that G8 refers back to the limited destruction of G7. IOW, God is promising to be a good boy and not wipe out the G7 (isn't that an economic grouping?) again. Once more, my point is that arguing over the interpretation of the wording in a couple of lines of the bible is playing into the creationists' hands - there are soooooo many other, much more viable alternatives to showing what a ridiculous story the Flud is.

Hee hee. We could even be more generous and let them do their feasibility study on land. I won't even ask them to float a boat. Hell, make it out of concrete (didn't some creationist org build a concrete replica or something? - vague recollection/senior moment here) for all that it matters. Then put Morris' lower limit of ~8000 species on board with a nice mix of carnivores, omnivores, and herbivores, staff it with 8 people untrained in animal husbandry, seal it up except for one little window on top for 600 days. After that, open it up and shovel out the rotting corpses. Of course, PETA would probably get pretty upset...

Yeah, it does sort of beg the question on intertidal zone critters. Also, it's not immediately obvious where amphibians belong - land or water dwellers? Olive Ridleys only come ashore to nest, Ambystoma mexicalis never leaves the water, although it's limited to fresh water. Aquatic or land crawler? Tis' a puzzlement.

Sorry BJ, couldn't resist. I know it was just a typo, but "world-wide Delude" was such an absolutely appropriate malapropism that I couldn't let it slide. Welcome back. Are you going to be able to stick around for awhile?

Excellent! I've always enjoyed (and learned from) your posts when the arkonauts get going.