ApostateAbe

Your math is off, sojourner. There are 2.54 cm in an inch, so

12 cm * in/2.54 cm * ft/12 in = .394 ft

And yes it would be more practical to calculate limits of space on the ark in terms of area instead of volume, so I don't have to pretend that the animals are stacked in a huge heap. But using area would take me a lot more time and guesswork. I think volume may illustrate my point to an adequate extent.

Frivolous

I can only attempt to counter a limited amount of arguments at a time, i know you are all eager to have your say, but please refrain from introducing too many in one day. This thread is for me to counter arguments that i think are plausible against the Ark not being physically possible without supernatural intervention. Too many arguments will affect this thread's readability.


In some place in England i think they keep a standard yard and pound in a safe, so that it can always be kept constant. Until then, these measurements may not have been accurately standardized. The original calendar was slightly inaccurate and had to be adjusted, this came a long time after Noah's Ark.

With the vast majority of species being insects and beetles, and guessing that the average beetle is about 1 cubic centimetre, there's plenty of space leftover. Particularly with 1810 cubic centremetres leftover per average beetle. And remember how many species of bacteria there are, 4 million species means including all species i assume. If you worked out the average size of an organism on earth, you would probably find it to be surprisingly small, giving extra space available for extra individuals to be used as food.

Pregnant animals, tiny eggs attached to fur coats and the fact that every individual animal need not have been fully grown needs to be taken into consideration.


Soon after the storm, there would have been a huge amount of floating plant debris around. It would have been improbable to locate every individual essential plant, but not impossible. Thousands of specific plant/animal diets may also be an underestimate or an area of science not completely understood, by which i mean that under different conditions back then certain animals may not have had such a specific dietary requirement.


I doubt that Noah would have determined it himself. There would have been extra individuals on board to feed the carnivores. Again it would have been improbable that each carnivore would choose to eat the allowable animals, but not impossible.

Extra individuals, lowered metabolism requiring less food and floating plant debris.

The bottom of the ark would have been cold, due to its closeness with the cold water, slowing the growth rate of bacteria. The top would have been warmer and the Ark may have been specifically engineered to be a ship with good ventilation and temperature regulation abilities.


i have to go now, i will come back later and continue posting, in the meantime please refrain from bombardment

ApostateAbe

Yes, I know that the average size of a species is rather small, so I will hand this point to you. Just be thankful that I decided not to use a more reasonable estimate of the total number of species. The 4 million does not include microscopic organisms.

Pregnancy and eggs do not help the problem. The six animals of each species need to have diverse genes (they can't share the same family).

According to a credible biblical authority,
"It rained and poured for forty daysies, daysies." Too rainy to gather plants for food within those forty daisies, don't you think? And at the end of those forty daysies, I think most if not all of the plant debris would be disintigrated or decayed. Remember that the flood lasted an entire year.

Genesis 6:18
"But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark--you and your sons and your wife and your sons' wives with you"

Genesis 8:15-16
"Then God said to Noah, 'Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives.'"

Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. So these extra individuals consisted of six people, seven people total. No mention of slave zookeepers. They must have been an extremely busy family.

Would the bottom of the ark be cold enough to sterilize bacteria for an entire year? I wish my refrigerator worked that well.

lpetrich

First, O Frivolous, I challenge you to demonstrate that Noah's Flood had happened, using ONLY geological evidence.

If you have difficulty doing so, <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-flood.html" target="_blank">here is a helpful site</a>. It has excellent arguments that you will find very valuable.

What did you expect, O Frivolous? And you make yourself seem like some whiny big baby.

Poor Frivolous has not read his favorite book very well, because the dimensions are originally given in cubits. The cubit is the distance from the elbow to the end of the middle finger, which can easily be measured -- for adults, it is about 1/2 m.

And great precision is not really needed for evaluating the feasibility of the Ark.

Noah and his family were 8 people -- it would have been a LOT of work to feed all those animals their individual diets. Also, it is expecting a LOT out of chance for all the carnivores to eat only the animals OK for them to eat.

Grow up.

Answerer

Frivolous, you still have not shown the evidence of why chinese historical accounts are less accurate than the biblical one. If you still can't show them, then I will take it that your accusations are baseless.

Jack the Bodiless

Frivolous:

It's not good enough to simply dismiss the Egyptians and Chinese historians as being "wrong". To do this, will you:

1. Argue that the historians that drowned in the Flood later lied, in Egyptian and Chinese, about their deaths. When you're dead, lying about being alive is rather difficult.

2. Argue that the descendants of Noah invented the Egyptians and Chinese, and planted thousands of artifacts in an elaborate hoax. A few centuries later, when all the languages of the world were scrambled in the Tower of Babel incident, they continued to lie (in Egyptian and Chinese) to conceal the fact that none of them understood Egyptian or Chinese anymore. This, also, is rather difficult.

3. Argue that the hoaxers lived after Babel. This makes the job of planting false records even bigger. And, remember, no record survives of ANY pre-Babel universal worldwide language: they would have to excavate every single site that might be of interest to future archaeologists, to remove every trace of the pre-Babel language, then cover their tracks perfectly so that no trace of their meddling will ever be found.

You must also explain why there is absolutely no trace of the Great Flood in rocks worldwide: no global sediment layer, no recent mass-extinction event in the fossil record.

And you need to learn MUCH more about genetics. Genes come in pairs. In each pair, each person inherits one gene from the mother and one from the father. If one of those genes is dominant, it can only mask the prescence of ONE recessive gene from the other parent. It is not possible for Noah and his family to carry the huge number of different genes that now exist within the human gene pool: they can only carry two genes for each trait! And the same applies to all the other creatures on the Ark.

Biff the unclean

(Frivolous) The recessive traits of Noah had nothing to do with gonorrhea. Sorry for the ambiguity. I'm saying that his recessive traits are what allowed the present diversity of cultures today…
You just make this stuff up as you go along, don't you?
First, Race is not a result of recessive traits.
But race is a big problem with your story. There were only eight crewmembers on the ark. The sons of Noah were supposed to be the fathers of the races. However there are many more races than the bible knew about. Where did they come from? Was there more than one ark. Or did the grandchildren of Noah split into more races? Careful, that's a trick question. The first goes against the bible and the second is Evolution.
Also if Noah had recessive genes then we all--being his descendents--must have recessive genes. That means that a three foot tall, black as night, couple of Pygmies could give birth to a six foot four blond haired blue eyed Nordic type. Yet that never happens. Why?

(Frivolous) Parasitic species weren't necessarily taken into the Ark. They may have lived in the bloodstream of mammalian whales during the flood. Or large sharks that ate human flesh in big enough pieces. Some deep sea sharks can grow very large, and their metabolism could have been slowed by a drop in temperature.
I don't mean to be insulting, but you seem to completely lack even the most basic of twenty-first century scientific knowledge. I don't see how-even if you just watch television-that that is possible.
We were talking about gonorrhea.
First it's a venereal disease caused by a microorganism called the gonococus. It is species specific-like the panda it eats only one thing. In gonococus that one thing is people.
Animals, even ittsy bittsy animals like the gonococus, will die if not given their proper food source. Even you will. Buffaloes, bulls and horses all grow huge and strong eating grass and hay, but if you were forced to eat it you would be dead in short order.
The only way for gonorrhea to get into the blood stream of a cetacean is for a human to have had sex with it. Even if that happened (how long can you hold your breath? The Orca has a penis that is approx five feet long…you do the math) there is nothing for the gonorrhea to eat.
If a whale or a great white shark eat a human the gonorrhea would be killed by their digestion. It could not, being a sexually transmitted disease, enter their blood streams through their stomachs.
If by magic the gonorrhea survived the super heated blood of a whale or the cold blood of the shark, with nothing to eat for a year, how does it get back into humans? Fish f**king?

If your girlfriend has told you a story about her eating some bad fish at a resturant, it's time to end that relationship.

Animals in times of distress can alter their normal living habits to cope with changes in environment.
As any zoo keeper will tell you, sever changes in their environment will kill most animals.

(Pandas) choose to eat these leaves, but we cannot be sure that they cannot survive on anything else. After all, what is it that bamboo has that no other plant has?
It isn't ten years since the bamboo die off in China nearly drove Pandas to extinction. There was a world-wide effort to save them. How did you miss this?

And speaking of plants, if they were all under brackish water for a year they would all be dead. Why aren't they?

Hawkingfan

First of all, there are several inconsistencies surrounding the story of Noah (taken from the Donald Morgan compilation):
1--GE 6:4 states that there were Nephilim (giants) before the Flood. And in GE 7:21 it says all creatures other than Noah and his family were killed by the Flood. But then in NU 13:33 it states there were Nephilim after the Flood. This does not make sense. Also, not only does the story of the Flood imply incest (Noah's family had to repopulate the earth), but it is not genetically possible for Noah and his family to repopulate the earth without deformities and mental retardation occurring in his descendants.

Another inconsistency involves the actual number of animals taken into the ark. In GE 6:19-22, 7:8-9; and 7:14-16 it says that two of each kind are to be taken, and were taken, aboard the Ark.
But in GE 7:2-5 Seven pairs of some kinds are to be taken (and were taken) aboard the Ark. My note--This was probably a late correction made by a scribe who realized later on that it says 1 of every animal is to be sacrificed after leaving the ark. Or maybe he realized that certain animals had to eat other live animals during that 40 day/night period.

A third inconsistency is in GE 7:7 where it says Noah and his clan enter the Ark. But why does it say in GE 7:13 that they enter the Ark again?

The engineering aspect does not make sense either. For instance, in GE 6:15 it states the size of Noah's Ark was such that there would be about one and a half cubic feet for each pair of the 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 species (whichever interpretation you use (2 or more pairs) to be taken aboard. You cannot fit an elephant into a 1.5 cubic foot. Or a hippo, or a horse, or a lion, or...

He must have had one mighty big pooper-scooper.

Also, there is no mention of metal support beams in the directions of building the ark. This would have been necessary for the massive weight inside it.

The idea in GE 7:17-19 that the flood covered the entire earth at the same time is preposterous. For one thing, there is no evidence of a worldwide flood, but rather of many, widespread, but local floods.

In GE 7:19-20 it says the flood covered the earth with water fifteen cubits (twenty plus feet) above the highest mountains, thus 29,000 ft. Mt. Everest would be buried under 22 ft. of water. Please answer--How did the author know the depth of the water? Did Noah take soundings? And where has all this water gone?--it is scientifically impossible for all that water to be absorbed and evaporate, reducing 29,000+ feet around the world in only 5,000 to 6,000 years!

As mentioned before, a ridiculous statement in GE 8:20 says Noah's first recorded action following the flood is to sacrifice one of every clean animal and bird. (Since so few animals were saved, this could be considered rather wasteful and defeating.)

GE 8:21 The odor of Noah's sacrifices was pleasing to the Lord. This nonsense speaks for itself.

Another scientific problem occurs in GE 9:12-16 where God first creates the rainbow. Apparently the laws having to do with refraction of light were null and void prior to this time?

Primordial Groove

My big thing is the amount of rain that would have to be produced. With Earth being a closed system (physically), there isn't enough water. I think the estimate was 10 feet of rain per hour, every hour for forty days and nights. 960 hours total.

The arguement that the water could have come from underground fissures is ludicrous.Let's say that water did come from underground; magically pulled to the atmosphere by a god that couldnt build a boat or miracle the animals to heaven until the water receeded. Anyway, the water would have ran back into the fissures from which it came, thus, the amount of surface water would have remained constant (more or less).
Not to mention, its a long ass swim from Australia to the middle east. Koalas and kangaroos arent the best swimmers in the world.

Which raises another point: why didnt god just allow all the animals to die, then resurrect them? Same with Noah and his family?

[ November 25, 2002: Message edited by: Primordial Groove ]</p>

Biff the unclean

Hmmm, speaking of ressurections, what about Gen 6:8 ?
But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.... Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.

If Noah was perfect and had found grace as Genesis clearly states, and everyone else was dead as a door nail, as Genesis also clearly states then that took care of original sin. If Noah is who the bible says he is then there is no need for a Jesus.