Noah’s Ark is Literal, eh?
For those out there that believe the Noah’s Ark story was a literal worldwide flood, you might want to check this out:
Unreasonable Faith recaps some of the points they make in the video:
1. Even if Noah took out all the “variations” and only stuck with “kinds,” that would still have been over 2 billion animals.
2. For a year in the ark, two elephants alone would require 365,000 lbs of food and 65,000 gal of water;
two giraffes would require 54,740 lbs of food
two lions would require 16,000 lbs of fresh meat.3. If Noah took all baby animals, how would all the babies get there from around the world at the same time? Or how would all the animals have babies at the exact same time?
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5. Not even most of the sea life could survive due to the changes in temperature, pressure, sunlight, filtration, salt.
The video makes the point that at an elevation of 29,055 feet, all the animals would freeze to death, or suffocate to death because the air is too thin.
I don’t think that’s right, because you’d displace the air upwards as well. 29,000 feet would be the new sea level, and the pressure would be the same as current sea level (or just a tiny bit less, since the air is occupying a larger volume).
But that’s just a nitpicky detail.
It’s also worth considering that the rainiest place on earth gets 39 feet of rain a year, or 1.28 inches a day. In order to cover Mount Everest in 40 days, it would have to rain 8,716.5 inches per day (726 feet). That’s so much rain that you’d drown standing in it. The sheer downward pressure of that much water would probably sink the boat.
Nothing could have survived (unless it was magic).
Tags: Noah's Ark, The Bible
January 14th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
When you’re dealing with “magical powers,” these are unconvincing details. Christians (and others) will simply state that “God” controlled all of these things so that the animals could survive. Since there is no mention of such things in the Bible, it works in their favor.
Perhaps a better approach would be to attack the dimensions of the boat itself, as well as the materials used to make it. They could still cry “magic!” if they wanted to, but it’s a bit sillier saying that the boat was a specific size but somehow still fit all the millions of animals onto it (did “God” shrink them down to pocket size?). I mean, if that’s the case, when why build a large ship at all? They could have used a raft if the animals were going to be magically shrunk, or if size wasn’t an issue.