Why I don't believe in the story of Noah's Ark
Obviously, or maybe not so obviously for some, I've always thought of the story of the flood as a folk story, preposterous on its face. But I'd never really thought it through in a lot of detail. This page resulted from a combination of seeing Ricky Gervais' comedic riffs on the Noah story, and coming into contact with an old friend who had become a young earth creationist. This mix led me to reread the story of Noah, and think about it a bit. After poking around on the internet, it began to look like I had some relatively unique views on the subject, or maybe it's more like no one was particularly interested in wasting their time on things that are so obvious. At any rate, for the creationists, here are my thoughts:The Curious Reasoning Behind God's Decision
God notices that man was wicked and evil, creating the impetus for the flood. And apparently beasts and creeping things and birds were also noticed as evil as well. Whatever. But it seems more than a bit odd to me that God, an omniscient "intelligent designer," would not have known that much about the designs themselves. In other words it seems very unusual to me that a so-called omniscient God could not foresee how things were going to play out, and could not get things right the first time. Doesn't sound very omniscient or intelligent to me. And let's see, the land based creatures are considered evil and must be exterminated, but not the sea based creatures. So a shark is "good," but robins and puppydogs and butterflies are "evil?"Right.
And it strikes me that God does nothing about the underlying situation. Nothing really changes. It's not like God gets rid of perceived evil by doing this, rather God just temporarily reduces the amount of it. God doesn't really start over or change the designs, but merely reduces the size of the populations through multiple genocides, I guess you could call it omnicide, pointlessly drowning countless millions of humans and other creatures.
There's a certain amount of anger in God, perhaps merely implied in this story, but certainly expressed clearly throughout the bible. And that strikes me as pretty odd as well. Because anger comes from the reptilian brain and is a very primitive feedback system, one that a small number of enlightened individuals have for all intents and purposes overcome. Yet God, the supreme omnipotent being, seems to be a slave to this emotion, unable to move beyond it in a way that some humans have. Additionally, anger can be defined as a measure of the difference between reality and one's expectations of reality. When there is a large enough difference for one to notice or to be surprised, one gets angry. But if you're omniscient, I just don't see any way you could be surprised. I see no possible way for expectation to differ from reality if you are omniscient.
At any rate, on to the flood.
The Water
My RSV bible describes the water as going 15 cubits above the highest mountain tops. That's a problem, because
The Freshwater Creatures
I figure the mammals and dinosaurs and other life and their numbers and size have been fairly well covered. The number of insect species alone is estimated to be around 9,000,000. But one take I haven't heard is the freshwater fish and other freshwater creatures. As I did my little thought experiment, thinking about the ocean levels rising and going inland, it began to occur to me that you have a big problem, because
Death by Malnutrition
The journey of the ark was surprisingly long, my read of it is that they were on the ark for about a year. This is a much longer time than was needed in later eras to cause sizable portions of ship's crews to die of malnutrition. Long sailing journeys typically involved at least a few stops at ports of call or an occasional landfall to replenish supplies - but for the ark, no stops were available.The Plants
I know enough about horticulture to be able to tell you that land-based plants submerged in several thousand feet of salt water are going to die, big time. No oxygen, no light, and the salt environment on top of it. So you're going to have to carry ALL of the land-based plant species, fungi, etc., on board as well. Good luck with that. There would be no live olive branch alive for a dove to bring back.Ocean Life
Not all, but much ocean life exists at shallow levels near the coastlines, dependent on a very specific ecological environment that would be utterly shattered by the addition of thousands of feet of water. So there's a fair amount of ocean life, both plant and animal, that would need to be aboard the ark. So, more aquariums needed. Salt water aquariums.The Microorganisms
You'd also have to take all the microorganisms on board. 5-10 million species of bacteria. Don't forget to bring influenza, hepatitis, hantavirus, rabies, HIV, the black plague, dengue fever, ebola, and smallpox! Thanks, God, for all those loving and intelligent designs!The Circle of Life
Rick Gervais' comedy routine talks about what you're going to feed the lions, i.e. according to the bible you get something like 2 or 7 of each animal, so that's not enough prey animals to feed the predators. But let's say you can get them to eat wheat. Maybe they can adapt. Maybe Koala bears don't have to eat eucalyptus leaves.The thing that occurs to me is that once the ark lands, you're not going to have any vegetation, because as described above, the flood would kill all the plants. So you're going to have to replant everything, which is a pretty tall order (as if the whole enterprise wasn't already a tall order). But not only that, you're going to have to establish large enough stands of grasses and food crops to sustain the prey animals. That's going to take a while. If you time it right, have enough workers, seeds, and so forth, at minimum you'd need a complete growing season. In the meantime, you'd have to keep feeding all the animals stored grains. Assuming they didn't all die of malnutrition.
But you're not done yet, because once you can let the prey animals go, you're going to have to wait until the population of prey animals is sufficiently large to sustain the predators. It would probably take years before you could let out the predators. So, in addition to all the millions of animals, plants, fish, insects, fungi, etc., you would need to have a couple of years worth of food on hand for all of them, plus enough to feed the predators for years after that.
I don't know, somehow it just seems to be a tiny bit unbelievable.
Since writing the above, came across this similar treatment:
Noah's Ark and the Great Flood