Amie

Not my choice, I voted on Abba's "dancing queen" just the coolest song around

Abacus

Well, I hope you find the time to come back and rebut the rebuttals.

Marduk

sigh, I haven't seen an explanation yet for how all these animals fit in a 450 X 50 foot boat, has anyone tried to calculate the weight of all these critters and their food & dung? Shall we cut her a break and not include the bugs?
What is the maximum boyancy and payload of a boat like this?
The Edmund Fitzgerald was a steel ship 700 feet long, I think it held 25 million pounds of ore when it sank, how much do all the critters in the world weigh, well two of each or seven of each if they were 'clean'. How did Noah know if they were clean or not, Moses won't be receiving Deuteronomy & Leviticus for another thousand years or so.
Did anyone see that comical version of the Ark story on NBC a few years ago? Pirates attacked the Ark!! arrrrrr Matey, keel haul the land lubbers, shiver me timbers buckoo!
arrrrr

[ September 16, 2002: Message edited by: marduck ]</p>

Amie

I think I addressed this. One of the last sane, it was not solely rainfall. I wanted to answer that before I get into Mortal Wombats question later.
Amie~

Amie

allright you bunch of skeptics! I am jumping ahead in the thread since I have been asked this 3 times via PM system.
Now the bible tells us that the ark was made of gopher wood and the cubit as hebrew scholars estimate would have been no less than 18 inches this would make the dimensions 450 feet long, 75 wide, and 45 feet high so the total available floor space would have been 100,000 square feet, more floor space than 20 standard sized basketball courts. The total cubic volume would have been 1,518,000 cubic feet, that would equal a capacity of 569 modern rairoad stock cars.
Bottom line: thats a helluvalot of space
Amie

Marduk

": thats a helluvalot of space "

bah! now behave or I won't let you skip the bugs! I think when it comes to a wooden boat the weight is just as important as the space.

Tristan Scott

Hi Amie,

Don't you think that it is possible that the Noah story was simply written from earlier Summerian and Babylonian stories in order to make them fit with the Hebrew god Elohim instead of the Sumerian or Babylonian god Ea? It is fairly common knowledge that a very similar story was written over a thousand years before it was written for the Torah. Is it so important to your faith that the flood story is true?

[ September 16, 2002: Message edited by: Tristan Scott ]</p>

SanDiegoAtheist

Not really. It's a lot of space if you're trying to move 1000 head of cattle a few hundred miles. It's a tiny amount of space if you're trying to hold 2 of every 'kind' and enough food for them for a full year at sea.

Most carnivores will eat several times their body mass a year. Most herbivores will eat several times their own body mass in food a MONTH. This isn't even getting into how this food was preserved for the year. The Ark would've had to have at LEAST half it's space taken up by miraculous foodstuffs that never spoil.

Of course, you also have to allow room for breezeways so that the air can move, passageways so that the animals can be moved in and out, and fed/watered/cleaned/etc by the crew, excercise areas for the animals - all of which cuts that usable area down even more.

Bottom line? It sounds like a lot of space, but compared to the load requirements, it'd be like trying to jam an elephant into a thimble.

Cheers,

The San Diego Atheist

Marduk

"Now the bible tells us that the ark was made of gopher wood"

They made wood out of Gophers!? that's gross.


The Sumerian stories are slightly different, the gods don't cause the flood. they know it's comming but they decide not to tell the humans, the god Enil wants to get rid of the noisy humans. He makes the other gods sware not to tell about the flood but Ea wants to save his creation so he spills the beans to Zisudra, his son by a human woman.

pug846

Simple Question: How did all of the deadly viruses that needed a host survive? Many of these virus kill the agent infected pretty quickly.