How did Noah fit so many animals on his Ark?

Post Reply New Topic

While there may have been a historic basis for a major flood, we're still talking about what amounts to Bronze Age mythology here.
And yes, I still consider myself a Christian.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Fact 1 - Magma is loaded with water, in steam form. Enough comes up and you get tons of water vapor in the air.

Fact 2 - If the land masses were level, the whole earth would be covered with water...without adding more.

A prominent theory about Noah's Flood is that a massive meteor strike caused massive tectonic shifts. Since the world had not known rain before this flood, it is sound that the nature of the atmosphere was radically different, and this event changed things. Breaking up the mantle let out a lot of magma so you had a destabilization of the atmosphere and a shifting in sea floors.

Also, people always think that ADULT animals went on board the ark. If they were all infants, you have a lot more space to work with.

It's possible that there were not as many animals back then as there are now. Most species today are really just "subspecies" of one species or another. Bengal tiger or Siberian tiger, they are both tigers. Nubian or Rothschild, both are still giraffes. I don't think there were as many subspecies of things as there are today. Dinosaurs are mintioned in the Bible, but many dinosaurs were actualy quite little and scientists even think there were not as many dinosaurs as previously thought and one "new" species was actualy just a baby of something else. For really big dinosaurs, why couldn't Noah have brought eggs? Why couldn't he have packed up eggs of other animals such as birds and reptiles as well.

The Flood happened only 5000 years ago according to Scripture. Not nearly enough time to produce the diversity of life we see on this planet.

ruveyn

We are talking about the same being that created quite literally everything including the laws of physics. Anyways, how much water is in the polar ice caps, supposedly it would cause all kinds of flooding if those melted...

Okay let's suppose for a moment all the ice caps, glaciers, etc. spontaneously melted in the matter of seconds. I could also argue God caused the water to appear from nothing quite literally since he created the universe.

Except that we were NOT there, we do not know what or how, and in the absence of any way to beam them into [not onto] the ark ingenious "it could have happened this way" scenarios will be read and discarded as just that.

It is not much more fruitful [and I grant that is not the only consideration] than pgd's incessant questions, "Why did Jesus put a stoner in charge of his church?", "Why does Christianity promote drunkenness?" [Cana,, "take a little wine"]

It is very tempting, and I have to hold back. PunkyKat's note and ruveyn's response just pull on my argumentative side.

But there IS the courtroom rebuke, "asked and answered". Pretty much any question about the Inundation and the ark has been shot over so many times. It is like playing twenty questions with kids in the car for 750 miles.

The Flood happened only 5000 years ago according to Scripture. Not nearly enough time to produce the diversity of life we see on this planet.

ruveyn[/quote]

Do you buy into Bishop Ussher, or have you a different source for your chronology? Ussher puts the flood at 2348 BC, which would be - give or take - 4358 BP. So unless you are rounding generously, you are using a different scale.

Obviously, though, you hold to a gradualist view of evolution, not Gould's punctuated equilibrium, I grant you, the time is short. But can we be sure the highly improbable CANNOT happen even without a divine nudge?

http://www.solarnavigator.net/noahs_ark.htm
Bible theology and modern evidence of it is one of my special intrests.

There were only two sheep, two goats, two bison, two kangaroos, etc.

It would take them hundreds of years to breed into large herds.

But in the meantime what did the two wolves, two foxes, two lions and two tigers eat?

If Noah had let all the animals off the Ark then the predators would have eaten the prey in the first few days and then starved to death.

About 1.6 percent of the planet's water is tied up in polar and mountain ice caps ( 80 percent of the water that is not in the ocean).The average depth of the ocean is about 12400 feet. So if you suddenly melted all of the ice on the planet it would raise the sea level by 1.6 percent-call it two percent. So the ocean would suddenly rise by 250 feet.

That would indeed be a catastrophic global event.
A sudden rise of 250 feet would drown much of the dry land on the planet- kill millions- and would create mind boggling devastation that could easily inspire long lasting legend.

But - it wouldnt be enough!
Not enough to explain Noah's Flood if you're going to take the Bible absolutely litereally.

Not only do you need to flood every acre of dry land on the planet you have to be able to "drown the tallest peaks on land". You would need a rise in sea level of 30,000 feet to cover Mount Everest in water.

But, as you said, God can do anything. He could make the surplus water out of nothing. Then make the surplus water magically vanish back into nothing when he's done. And do both instantaneously.

And.. he could magically erase all evidence that the flood ever happened (which apparentlly he did).

And... God is what makes that little green man disappear.

You know.. that little green man that follows you around everywhere you go, but disappears every time you turn to look at him.

Do you buy into Bishop Ussher, or have you a different source for your chronology? Ussher puts the flood at 2348 BC, which would be - give or take - 4358 BP. So unless you are rounding generously, you are using a different scale.

Obviously, though, you hold to a gradualist view of evolution, not Gould's punctuated equilibrium, I grant you, the time is short. But can we be sure the highly improbable CANNOT happen even without a divine nudge?[/quote]

Usher's dating is based on a literal reading of Genesis. I do not "buy into" fairy tales or myths. That is why I do not take the three or four ages of Arda (from J.R.R. Tolkien) as any more or less seriously than the Genesis Myth. The world is over four billion years old and there was never a Flood such as described in the biblical portion on Noah. More probable was a global ice age (Ice Ball Earth) about 600 million years ago.

ruveyn

Yes, but I am wondering what the source is on your "5000 according to Scripture" I am totally aware [not being blind] of your stance on Genesis as textbook.

If you pulled 5000 out of as hat, fine. Ussher's work cannot really stand even on its own premises. But if there is an alternative to Ussher [I would think the Creation Science people would HAVE to have one, it would be interesting to know about.

For what it's worth, any attempt to pin dates on prehistory [as i have pointed out professionally at several venues] in in my view very risky. Even the likes or carbon dating [tree ring dating is somewhat more robust] rest on a stack of assumptions that science could collapse at any moment.

And - for the record - I am not at all disagreeing with you, though I might quibble here and there for my own pleasure - a planetwide cataclysmic extinction event which involves modern humans is not going to let us have an adequate biodiversity without miraculous intervention - which is definitely a problem for a literal interpretation of the ark account.

Bishop Usher's literal dating is the basis.

ruveyn

So - thanks. Big roundup but I don't have to hunt.

If you folk want to discuss (and try and discredit) the Bible, maybe you should read it first.
Genesis chapter 1 :- 6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” 7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

There used to be waters above the sky, a protective water canopy, people lived hundreds of years before the flood, after the flood it became what it is now, also rainbows only appeared after the flood as a result of the change in light once it didnt have to pass through a water mantle wrapped around the planet.

2 Peter 3 :- 5For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
Some translation say the Earth was out of water, yet in the midst of water, that being an Earth that was encased in a globe of water, this resulted in a more even climate over the whole globe, its why they find the remains of forests under the polar ice caps.

As for history of the flood, read Josephus, the Roman Historian who matter of factly reports how people where carving lumps of wood from Noahs ark to where as lucky amulets.
Look up how many cultures of the world have legends of a worldwide flood, not just Biblical cultures.

How would a water canopy save us from ebola or pneumonia or almost anything else?

Also, you do understand the physics of rainbows, don't you? It's just visible light separated into its component wavelenghths. Saying that there were no rainbows before the flood is the same as saying that the world was monochrome before the flood.