Lord Draegon
Awoken
The evidence is clear
Rain and Mountains
This is one of the problems that I illustrate to creationists that I just recently met, the reason being that it's very easy to comprehend, and, once understood, anyone can see why it presents such a large problem for the Noah's Ark myth of the bible. The argument goes like this: according to the bible, the flood that supposedly destroyed our world some four thousand years ago was so catastrophic that it covered even the highest mountains completely. As is well known, the highest mountain in the world is Mt. Everest, which stands at a straggeringly high 29,000 feet. This means that Noah's flood had to have made water rise all over the world to at least 29,000 feet. If it didn't, then Mt. Everest wouldn't have been covered. Also according to the bible, all of this rain fell in forty days. Let's examine what this implies.
My objective here is to show you how fast rain would have to fall to cover all the mountain tops in forty days. How do we find that out? Well, it should be noted that rainfall is measured in units per hour, not day. You don't hear the weatherman telling you that your area encountered 3 inches per day downfalls. He expresses it in hours. So let's convert our forty days into hours. 24 hours a day, forty days, that means 960 hours. So 29,000 feet of water fell in 960 hours. Before I tell you how much that is, let me explain something. Rainfall is measured in inches per hour. Why not feet? Because the only place that a foot of rain can fall in one hour is in the tropical rainforest, and even there it's a stretch. A foot per hour rains is so hard that it is likely to hurt you. You wouldn't be able to see your own hand in those kinds of rains, even if you held it a foot away from your face. Back to our answer. 29,000 feet in 960 hours. That means that everywhere, all over the earth, 30 feet per hour rains were falling down.
Thirty feet per hour rains. That isn't rain. That's more like several high pressure firehoses focused on one spot. Thirty feet per hour rains would destroy houses. It would demolish cars with ease. Noah's little boat would be crushed by these rains. There is no way that Noah and his ark would have survived such conditions. Keep in mind that the ark was built out of wood. There is no question about it: Noah and his family would be dead within minutes, along with the animals that were supposed to repopulate the earth. This is an incredible flaw in the bible.
Defenses Against the Argument
Every time I present an argument to a creationist, I ask him or her for a defense that does not use God. Why aren't they allowed to use God? Using God to solve your religion's problems makes your theory unfalsifiable. If I were Hindu, I could use my gods to fix any errors with my holy book, and Hindiusm would be right up there with Christianity. Any religion that has powerful gods can quickly fix up any alleged contradictions with their myths, and that's exactly why I don't let them use God. For more information on this, read my article on creation "science" in general. It goes into much more detail.
Now, back to the defenses against the rain argument. The only one that I seem to hear nowadays is the one about the height of mountains. Creationists claim that mountains weren't nearly as high when the flood took place as they are now. It is a well known fact that mountains move incredibly slowly. It's basically the result of large chunks of rock pushing on each, forcing the edges of the rock to be thrusted upwards, although the word "thrusted" makes it seem a lot faster than it really is. Because of how slow mountains move, one must ask, "how did the mountains go from being very low (about 8,000 feet according to most of the creationists I've talked to) to the staggering height of 29,000 feet in a mere 4,000 years?". At normal rates, there is no way that the mountains could have shot up that quickly (4,000 years, as long as it may seem, is quicker than the blink of an eye to the rates of slow processes such as plate techtonics*). To this, the creationists simply tell us that large amounts of volcanic activity made them shoot up. Unfortunately for our fundamentalist friends, there is no way that enough volcanic activity could spring up out of nowhere to cause all mountains to start rising so fast, then stop just as abruptly. Such a thing is completely unheard of. What could have caused so much volcanic activity? The creationists, although even they probably don't like doing it, have to resort to God on this one. Basically, they say that God made the mountains rise really fast, then made them go really slowly. What evidence do they have of this? None. What reason do they have for thinking that this is true? None. The only people who would think that God fiddled with the earth just to deceive us all are the people that already believe that the bible is true. This is circular reasoning. They say that the bible is true. I say no and show them some flaws, such as the rain argument. They reply that these aren't flaws -- God can fix them up. I ask them how they know God did any of that. They tell me they know because the bible is true, which brings us back to the beginning.
Creationists never cease to amaze me in their blind faith and stupidity. They'll work out any bizarre, completely unsupported scheme to fix their problems that they can. The bible says it, therefore, it has to be true. This is the reasoning of the creationist.
* Actually, it's likely to be much less than four thousand years. We know that the mountains have been relatively the same height for quite a while. As far as recorded history goes back, people thought that mountains were stationary. This may limit the amount of time for the mountains to raise to less than 3,000 years.
The Size of the Ark
The problem of the size of the ark is so rudimentary, so painfully obvious, that it's astounding that anyone with the slightest hint of intelligence would not notice it, given the facts. According to Genesis 6:15, God told Noah to make the ark three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high. A cubit is equal to about 1.5 feet, so the ark was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. The bible says that Noah was to take two of each unclean animal and seven of each clean animal. In all honesty, I do not know what an unclean animal is, so I'm going to assume that there are only two of each animal for simplicity's sake. I have asked several people what an unclean animal is, and none of them really seem to know. (If you know, I'd appreciate it if you told me.) Let's think about this. There are millions of species of animals on this planet, and a good chunk of them live on the land. According to the bible, Noah basically took anything that lived on land or had wings. That means Noah was required to bring along two of each species of mammal, reptile, bird, amphibian, and insect. The insect group alone has millions of species, and combined with the other animals that Noah had to bring, the number of species is astronomical. Take that number and double it, and you will have the number of animals that Noah had on his ark (doubling it because there are two of each species).
There is absolutely no way that so many animals could have fit into the ark, and no one disagrees with me, not even the creationists. The creationists know that it would be impossible to have so many animals in one space. Instead, they claim that when the bible speaks of Noah taking two of each "kind" of animal, it refers not to species, as anyone would believe without being told otherwise, but one of the higher groups of classification, and that he then breeded the kinds into the animals that we see today. Taxonomists classify animals by grouping them into categories that are more and more specific. The categories are as follows: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, kingdom being the most general, and species being the most specific. Which of these groups the word "kind" refers to has not been made clear by the creationists, although I'm quite sure that it's none of them, seeing as this system of classification was invented thousands of years after the flood. So, if "kind" doesn't refer to species, then what does it refer to? The creationists never really say, but to me, it doesn't matter, because you can't take two dogs and two wolves and make all the species of dogs and wolves we see today. You simply can't do it. It's genetically impossible. The genes for all of the traits of every kind of dog species are not in one dog, nor are all of the genes for all of the traits of every kind of wolf species in one wolf. To get all of the different genes that are present in each species of dog (and that are required to breed the dog into existence), you need many dogs. You can't have the genes for green eyes, blue eyes and brown eyes all in one person, can you? You can't have the genes for short and floppy ears, long and floppy ears, and long and hard ears all in one dog, can you? Of course you can't. You need many people to carry all of the genes for eye color or hair color or skin color. You need many dogs to carry all of the genes for ear structure or hair color. One person cannot have blonde, brown, black and red hair all at the same time. You would need two people for that. (I say two instead of four because each person actually has two genes for each trait such as eye color or hair color, it's just that only one shows up [unless both are mutually dominant or recessive, let's not get into that]. One person would carry blonde and black, another would carry brown and red.)
There is a trade-off between the number of animals that you bring on the ark and the number of animals you can create from those animals. If you bring a lot of animals on the ark, two of each species, then you'll have all of the species after the flood, but you'll have a size problem. If you bring few animals on the ark, two of each family, you'll have enough room, but you'll be missing most of the animals that you were supposed to have saved. Either way, you've got a serious problem. But let's give the creationists the benefit of the doubt for a minute, and suppose that it is somehow possible to "cram" all of the necessary genes into very few animals. I've been talking about breeding dogs and wolves, which sounds rather practical and pretty believable. It's easy to breed dogs because they're domesticated. So what about the non domesticated animals? While you can imagine Noah and his family breeding dogs into the species that they didn't save, it's rather hard to imagine them breeding dinosaurs, salamanders or beetles. Breeding dogs is practical; breeding sloths is not. It's especially hard to imagine Noah and his family keeping so many animals under control, regulating the breeding so that the right genes get mixed together to form the animals that weren't saved. They would have to have been controlled because the likeliness that the original species would be born by random chance is incredibly small. If they weren't controlled, then entirely new species would arise rather than the old ones.
Trying to breed back to life all of the species that Noah didn't take with him with a few animals from each family is ridiculous. It's impossible. It's impractical. Noah had to take all of the species with him. Claiming that the bible means a larger group of taxonomy when it says kind is only done to explain away the problem proposed by the size of the ark. But the animals are not the biggest problem for the size of the ark. It's their food that's the real problem. Noah and his animal friends were on the ark for about a year (although it only rained for forty days, it took the rest of the year for the water to dry up). That means that Noah had to have brought along enough food to sustain each creature for a year. The amount of food needed to sustain the animals would, I imagine, take up more than twice the amount of space as the animals themselves. Suppose that the average human eats one pound a day. I'm pretty sure it's more that, but for simplicity, let's say it's a pound a day. That means that in one year, a human would eat 365 pounds of food. That's more than twice the weight of the average person. If you have three meals a day, then that means that for each person, there would be 1,095 meals on the ark. Now imagine all of the food that would be required to feed 50 elephants, 50 bears, 50 rhinos, and 50 hippos for an entire year. It's a huge amount of weight, and it would take up an unthinkable amount of room on the ark. There is absolutely no way that Noah could have fit all of the animals and their food for a year on the ark.
We've been given the size of the ark, and we've been told what animals Noah brought along with him, and they just don't coincide. It is yet another fatal flaw of the bible, pointed out by simple analysis.
What Did the Carnivores Eat?
Here's a good question for the creationists: what did the carnivores eat on the ark? It was essential that every animal survived on the ark because there were only two of each species. If one died, then the entire species would go extinct because there would only be one male and no female or one female and no male. If that's the case, then we must ask ourselves what the carnivores ate. Carnivores need meat. They need fresh meat, to be specific. Noah couldn't have brought along meats because they would have rotted during the year long period on the ark. Let's also keep in mind that the state of the art preservation technology of the time was salting the meat, which didn't do a whole lot. Even in the refrigerator, leftover meat only lasts a week or so before it goes bad, and it becomes next to useless during a year long stay in the freezer. Any meat that Noah brought along with him to feed the carnivores with would have rotted away within a few weeks. So what exactly were the carnivores eating? Other animals? If Noah fed some of the other animals to the larger carnivores, he would have wiped out entire species in the process! What were they living on?
