Noah’s Ark vs. Math. Math Kills Noah’s Ark (Math Wins).
According to Creationists, all the animals alive today are descended from the pairs of animals Noah brought onto the Ark before The Flood which supposedly happened 4,000 years ago. According to the first creation story in Genesis, animals were created by God according to their own “kind”. Noah was instructed by God to bring animals of each kind onto the ark, and the term kind still plays a big part in Creationist thinking today. The problem is that no one seems to know what a kind is.
Does it simply mean species? That would seem to me to be the most obvious and easy answer, except there’s no way that all the species of multicellular land organisms could fit onto Noah’s Ark. It must be something taxonomically higher. There are still too many genera of extant animals to fit into an Ark, so that’s ruled out. Could it possibly be roughly analagous to families of animals?
I have heard Creationists speculate something similar. Cats are of one kind; bears are of one kind; equines are of one kind. Those categories do correspond to taxonomic families: Felidae, Ursidae, and Equidae. The different species of bear we have today descended from one species of bear, but they are all still part of the created kind “bear”. This is what Creationists call “microevolution”, which they readily accept. What they oppose is the concept of “macroevolution”, which would be one created kind transitioning into another: Artiodactyls into Cetaceans, or dinosaurs into birds.
So I decided to conduct a thought experiment to actually quantify the implications of this. For the sake of simplicity, I am only including mammals in this exercise.
According to Mammal Species of the World there exist today 5,400 mammal species in 153 familes. If the created kind is analogous to the taxonomic family, then Noah would have brought 153 pairs of mammals onto the ark, which afterwards diversified, via microevolution, a concept undeniable even to Creationists, into the 5,400 extant species. Since The Flood supposedly occurred 4,000 years ago, this would have had to happen very quickly.
In fact, according to some simple division, there would have had to be an average of 1.31 new mammal species arising every year! Wow! Microevolution is exponentially faster than macroevolution!
Except, waitaminnitwhat??? One of the most repeated “arguments” Creationists use is that if evolution really happened, surely someone, somewhere, in all of human history would have witnessed it! Aside from the fact that we actually have witnessed it, both directly in bacteria, and indirectly through the fossil record, what about the ridiculous amount of microevolution that would have needed to occur since the Noahic Flood to account for the current amount of mammalian diversity? Surely someone, somewhere, in all of human history would have witnessed it. I mean, it happened 5,247 times in 4,000 years, and that’s completely ignoring the ridiculous amount of diversity found in birds, arthropods, amphibians, and reptiles. If that many new mammal species have arisen within the time span of recorded history, there would be a record of it.
So here’s the bottom line: If the created kind corresponds to anything lower than a family, there is simply no way representatives could of each kind could fit onto one boat. If the created kind corresponds to the taxonomic family or anything higher, there is simply no way to account for the current biodiversity we see in the natural world. There is no way the Genesis account of the Noahic Flood could have literally happened.
Sources:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i3/ligers_wolphins.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal
http://www.trueorigin.org/glossary.asp
Also special thanks to Ann K. and Jeremy B.
Stumble it!
November 16th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
God loves you anyways.
November 17th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Thank you. I sincerely do appreciate that.
November 19th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
One of the many ways in which creationists (and fundamentalists in general) have gone horribly wrong is in their understanding of scripture. Scripture is “inerrant” or “infallible” insofar and ONLY insofar as it reveals the One True God, which is primarily accomplished in the record of the life of Person: Jesus Christ. The creation account mustnt be read as one would read a science textbook!
November 26th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Have you considered the possibility that scripture is not inerrant or infallible at all, but rather a somewhat disjointed collection of folk-tales, political claims, mythology and philosophy?
November 26th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Maybe speciation only happens when people aren’t looking?
November 26th, 2007 at 10:03 am
“The creation account mustnt be read as one would read a science textbook!”
Very true. It should be read as a typical early stab at explaining our existence, based on contemporary understanding of the world. Considering that the scholars who wrote it knew far less about the universe than a normal grade-schooler does today, it’s no surprise these old creation stories turned out so charmingly goofy;-)
November 26th, 2007 at 10:42 am
“Scripture is “inerrant” or “infallible” insofar and ONLY insofar as it reveals the One True God, which is primarily accomplished in the record of the life of Person: Jesus Christ.”
surely if the importance of Jesus’ life is reliant on the validity of the Old Testament (which a quick reading of the Bible will confirm) then the fact that the Old Testament is so obviously, demonstrably unreliable; untrue; immoral etc. should signal a few warning bells, no?
November 26th, 2007 at 10:47 am
The creationist account from Genesis isn’t just poor science, it’s poor metaphor, mainly because it gets things in the wrong order. It has the sea, and even grass, herbs and fruits, being created before the stars. It makes the ‘light’ appear before the sun, which appears after all the other stars.
Because the account is so anthropomorphic, because it describes creation from the vantage point of human priorities, it actually radically undermines the whole idea that the Bible was written with inspiration from beyond our perception.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:02 am
Birds: 227 families with some 10,000 species (at least this many, may be as many as 13,000 or more). That’s like 2.5 - 3 new bird species arising every year. They don’t believe in macroevolution, but they happily believe in rates of “microevolution“ that would stagger any evolutionary biologist. Rates that for some strange reason don`t seem to be measured in the present.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:04 am
Of course there is another math problem with the whole story. How were these animals able to cover the distance to the ark and then spread themselves out afterwards? And how did all those marsupials get to Australia? But if you try to present these arguments to a true believer they will just shrug their shoulders and say that godditit. Morons.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:08 am
Let’s not leave out fish! A world-wide flood would wipe out most freshwater fish because of the salt water contamination of their habitats. Most salt water fish would also die because of the diluting of seawater by the mixing of all fresh water, including that locked up in ice, and, of course, from 40 days and nights of rain.
Also, all terrestrial plant life would be wiped out from being submerged under water almost a year. Noah didn’t take any potted plants on board, did he?
November 26th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Dave S.: The birds just flew the whole time. Duh.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:12 am
I don’t think T.C. deserves to be patronised. S/he is presumably one of those reasonable, non-fundamentalist, non-creationist Christians one is always hearing about; when one actually turns up, a bit less hostility might be in order. It sounds as though there is nothing about the bible with which T.C. and an atheist would disagree, except that bit about it revealing a One True God in the Person of JC.
That’s a fairly important bit, of course. But, unlike claims that the bible reveals the earth to be 6,000 years old, or rabbits to be ruminants, or pi to equal 3, it’s not a claim that denies the findings of science.
It is a claim that atheists believe wrong (or, as some might prefer, meaningless). But that’s OK. People can believe what they like, so long as they don’t insist I believe the same (or pass laws that require me to act as though I believed the same), and as long as they don’t argue that their theological beliefs entitle them to say anything about science. If all Christians were like T.C., other people would have less to complain about.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Tim: Obvy, they microevolved anadromy for the duration of the flood.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:19 am
It’s a myth. Myths are great. Here’s my interpretation:
“The book of Genesis is a collection of stories woven together by some unknown redactor. The work contains legend, poetry, fantasy, genealogy, short story, and other literary forms which are blended together to form a more or less coherent whole. Genesis is a kind of universal history; like other myths, it presents a story about what the beginning of time may have been like. It opens with two distinct creation myths: one emphasizing the transcendental nature of the creator god and the other emphasizing the human-like properties of the same creator god. The first god creates by fiat, by giving verbal commands; the second creates by breathing air into a lump of clay. The two may be different versions of the story by different poets, or they may be contrary projections of the complex human creation called god. The “third,” if the projection is read as a psychological ground, would be this: the verbal is the lump of clay. God speaks and the world begins. God speaks and life begins. The creative power of speech is celebrated in the beginning. Language with its formal aspects - its rules of syntax and semantics - is the perfect analog for creation itself, since language gives us the power to create order and meaning out of the chaos of experience.
The creation myth can be read as a description of any act of creation: first the intention, then the translation from mind to matter, and then the evaluation: “and it was good.” Professor Douwe Stuurman, who taught The Bible as Literature at the University of California in the nineteen sixties, pointed out in lectures that the creation myth, when read aloud, will be heard to be an accurate description of the completion of any creative act. He told us the story of his first wife, a blind poet, who had asked him to read Genesis 1 and 2 aloud to her and who when he finished said “that is precisely the feeling of creating a poem.” In writing a poem one starts with an idea and a blank and formless page. The creative act of beginning to “blow” life into that page and after some time (and with some luck) giving form to the stuff of the mind, transforming it into a new medium has formed a completed work. Human creation, like Eliot’s The Wasteland, is often a multi-staged affair with false starts, revisions, crumpled failed attempts tossed away, and a complex of discovery and creation. The poet does not know the poem until it is finished. And when finished the feeling is there to be expressed: “And it is good.”
Read this way `good’ is an aesthetic term, as in “Shane is a good movie” or “King Lear is Shakespeare’s best play.” Value terms are ambiguous in that sense, for we use many of the same words to describe both aesthetic and moral judgments, `good’ doing service in both categories of judgments. “And it was good” as used in Genesis is evaluative, but not in the moral sense. The story itself is silent on the moral status of the creation and therefore the puzzle of how evil can arise in a perfect creation arises only because of the confusion between aesthetic and moral uses of the word `good.’ `Is the universe and everything in it good?’ is the wrong question to ask when `good’ is used in the moral sense. Such a question gets currency only if one presupposes that the logically prior assertion `God is good’ is true, and that there is a perfect transfer from creator to creation. But in the creation myths in Genesis we have no argument to establish the truth of that claim, in fact, Genesis actually tells us very little about God. “In the beginning of creation, when God made heaven and earth…” presupposes the existence and nature of God and the reader has the task of creating God from the narrative stuff provided. From the first line of the book the main character is a given, yet a mystery, a term looking for a referent. Here again confusion arises when we fail to see that the particular kind of verbal act the writer uses in the story is not one to be evaluated by some correspondence theory of truth, but is rather a proclamation or statement in the sense that the Canadian Constitution is a proclamation or set of statements. If one says of a country’s constitution, `It is true’ what exactly is one saying? Constitutions constitute the rules of the game, and are, as we all know, subject to interpretation throughout time. The logical status of many statements in the Bible is similar to the logical status of rules of a game: `three strikes and you are out’ not only regulates the game of baseball, it also constitutes the game. “And it was good” is thus proclamation and aesthetic judgment. The priests who compose the account of the creation presuppose God, as an objective being. God, as a character in a narrative, is yet to be discovered.” [from Reading the Bible, p.47]
November 26th, 2007 at 11:20 am
Thanks for saying that, Mrs. Tilton. TC is a good friend of mine who literally saved my life once. And I think you presume correctly about him. I wish there were more of us like him.
November 26th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
This is one of my favourite arguments to use against creationists. It’s extremely easy to lead them into a dead end by starting with the “Surely Noah couldn’t have fitted all the species on the ark”. Once they admit that, then it’s a short hop to getting them to argue in favour of evolution more dramatic and rapid than any biologist would propose. The moment when they realise what they’ve done is always priceless.
November 26th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
The second version of the flood story in Genesis says that seven of each clean animal were taken on board the ark. (Ignore the Yahwists, trust the Priests!) So for those groups, you need a much lower mutation rate, since the founding population was probably more genetically diverse.
Anyway, the reality is that Noah must have had some other way of preserving lineages…frozen embryos maybe? Although only Noah and his family got on the ark, Cain’s descendants show up after the flood. (Noah was descendant of Seth). If he was using frozen embryos, he only needed representatives who were closely enough related to serve as surrogate mothers. See…it isn’t so far-fetched an idea after all ;)
November 26th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
[…] Noah’s Ark vs. Math. Math Kills Noah’s Ark (Math Wins). […]
November 26th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
“Anyway, the reality is that Noah must have had some other way of preserving lineages…frozen embryos maybe?”
If only InGen hadn’t paid off Dennis Nedry…
November 26th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
When, as a child, I asked my mother about this, she made the ark out to be like the TARDIS. (You know, bigger on the inside.) Not very creative, but an easy out for her.
November 26th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
My favorite Gaping-Hole-The-Size-Of-Alaska in the Noah story: We are told that just a *whole* lot of water got injected into the oceans — “Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.” (Gen 7:20). Okay, fine… but all that water is going to reduce the salinity of the oceans, in a *big* way. Why? Because rain (see also Gen 7:4: “I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights”) is *fresh* water. In particular, all that fresh water is getting deposited on the *surface* of the oceans.
How many plankton species can survive a sudden, massive reduction in the salinity of the water they live in?
Once the plankton goes away, how many *other* species, which formerly had plankton as the sole/major component of their diet, *also* go away?
In other words, Ye Floode scenario necessarily results in the eradication of what may be *the* single most vital component of the oceanic food-web. Lose plankton, and it won’t be more than a few centuries, at most, before the entire ocean goes sterile…
November 26th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Frozen embryos, ha ha ha ha. How would he have retrieved those and and where exactly would he have gotten the liquid nitrogen to store them ?
November 26th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Wandered here from pharyngula, hope I’m not intruding.
I always wondered what the predators all ate after getting off Ye Arke. After all, predator:prey ratio has to be something like 1:1000. The two big cats get off the ark, first thing they do is chase down and eat one of the gazelles — oops, no more gazelles.
Ditto regarding attitudes towards T.C. I’m married to one of them perfectly reasonable Christians myself.
But the bibliolaters have an answer to it, of course. Like they do for starlight — the speed of light exponentially decreased from the moment of creation until 1960, when we were first able to measure it precisely. From then on it’s been constant.
Or like continental drift. The continents were all joined as Pangaea until after the flood (so the animals could all walk from Ye Arke to their current habitats); then the continents split up and spread out really really fast — several miles per year — and just when we started being able to measure distances precisely, they slowed to their current rate.
Thus the same with evolutionary rates: they were enormously fast right up until we started carefully observing most species — then they slowed way down, so we can’t see speciation in real time anymore.
Seriously, this is what they’ll come up with. Just watch.
November 26th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Yes, yes. But this all assumes that mathematics is true.
November 26th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
@eyeglassgame- It’s a trick they stole, this time from quantum mechanics–one can’t measure the rate of speciation that one can actually see occurring in much the same way one can’t measure both the position and momentum of subatomic particles.
November 26th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
You seem to rule out extinct animals being on the ark, yet wasn’t Noah told to bring 2(or 7) of all kinds of animals aboard? That’s why I can’t buy the “dinosaurs couldn’t swim, that’s why they’re extinct” argument. If Noah didn’t do as God told him, the ark would have hit an iceberg and all aboard would have drowned!
November 26th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
“Yes, yes. But this all assumes that mathematics is true.”
Nail on the head, Drake.
You see, there are micromathematics and macromathematics. The number of species belongs to the micromathematics realm, whereas the number of families belongs to the realm of macromathematics. The mistake was blithely using division to combine these incompatible values. Instead, a special metamathematical function (which is too complex to belabor here) must be performed, which gives us the number of new species formed since the Flood as: 0. Thus all the created kinds could have fit on the Ark without any speciation occurring.
November 26th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
If you are going to try to challenge the Noatic story using mathematics you are bound to loose. Any mathematician will tell you that when you draw a circle on a plane or a spherical shell in three dimensional space, it is quite arbitrary which area or volume you consider to be the inside and which the outside. After building the arc, Noah merely declared the exterior to be the inside (God chose him because of his mathematical acumen) and pairs of each species were automatically inside the arc. God the poured 15 cubits of water into the arc. Noah then merely had to train some bird to fly into the arcs window and not return. Notice that all the skeptics questions concerning the reasonableness of the story are resolved (although there might now be some new questions raised).
November 26th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
T.C., that’s an interesting point. There’s poetry/psalms/proverbs, and then there’s important doctrine.
November 26th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Error in Noah’s Ark math thought experiment
Although I agree with Jeffthefish that the creationists do not have much of a grasp on reality I have to disagree with his use of math in this thought experiment.
Taking the amount of mammal species alive today and simply dividing that through the numbers of years since the “flood” (according to creationists) to give about 1.35 speciation events from the original 153 “kinds” on the Ark is erroneous (I will also assume that “kinds” are analogous to taxonomic families). This approach assumes that all speciation events (or should it be “kindification” events…!) occur sequentially, one after the other, and no simultaneous events occur.
If, however, one follows a more realistic cladistic approach then each mammal “kind” would diversify to two new “kinds”, and these two new “kinds” on their turn would give rise to four new “kinds”. In effect, starting with the original 153 “kinds” straight out of the Ark, we would get a sequence like this : 153 – 306 – 612 – 1224 – 2448 – 4896 – 9792. It is clear that should these events occur roughly simultaneously one would require slightly more than 5 mass or bulk speciation (“kindification” anyone?) events to reach the present 5400 species of mammals. Dividing these 5 events through 4000 years yields 5 periods of 800 years and then one would get that every 800 years there would be progressively more potentially observable speciation events. And the last 800 year period would have had potentially 4800+ events to observe. These 8 centuries also include the times when Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) - and those naturalists who preceded and followed him, until the present- were actively making rigorous scientific observations to come to grips with biological diversity.
Likewise birds with about 10 000 species within 227 families will give a sequence that also requires slightly more than five bulk events (227 – 454 – 908 – 1816 – 3632 – 7264 – 14528) with about 7200+ bird speciation events for Linnaeus & Co. to observe. More diverse animal groups such as insects, with a conservatively estimated 5 000 000 species within about 200 common families (“kinds”?), would actually require slightly more than 15 speciation events (200 – 400 – 800…..all the way to 3 276 800 – 6 553 600), or one bulk event every 267 years. This leaves Linnaeus & Co. with over 3 000 000 potentially observable insect speciation s events for the last 3 centuries.
So instead of just about 350 potentially observable mammal speciation events since Linnaeus we would actually have more than an order of magnitude more. And birds and bugs would blow these numbers completely out of the water.
But here I have to concur with Jeffthefish again. Creationists might whine that these speculative numbers are unrealistic but this caricature of speciation – or creationist “kindification” since the “flood” - flows directly from their initial flood apologetics. If the conclusion is unrealistic their initial argument and the storybook it is based on is equally unrealistic. Garbage in, garbage out.
November 26th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
alex wrote: “surely if the importance of Jesus’ life is reliant on the validity of the Old Testament (which a quick reading of the Bible will confirm) then the fact that the Old Testament is so obviously, demonstrably unreliable; untrue; immoral etc. should signal a few warning bells, no?”
Nah. The relevance of passages of the Old Testament to the Christ story is going to vary, obviously. Some bits are going to be fairly directly relevant. Others (Noah’s ark, etc) are pretty orthogonal.
Furthermore, one could assume that the New Testament, depicting events in periods of advanced cultural development, are likely to be more dependably recorded than events which are supposed to have happened much earlier and that were not recorded.
I think, rather than using the OT as a foundation on which to build the case for Christ, Christians should take Christ as the given, which lends credence to the OT, but does not require that everything be taken literally; the father the Bible strays from topics directly relevant to Christ, the more flexibly those parts can be interpreted.
Then again, I’m a slacker Buddhist, so what do I know.
November 26th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
Creationists don’t believe anything other than what is convenient for the lie they are in the process of uttering. This explains why the current Republican Party’s “base” is largely composed of creationists, since they share to a T the same disrepect of facts, truth, and those who refuse to massage their fear and self-loathing.
November 26th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
#5: “Maybe speciation only happens when people aren’t looking?”
I like where you’re going with this, kind of a Quantum interpretation. This way Noah doesn’t have to take all those animals on the ark, he can just take a single enitiy in a quantum superposition of all possible animals, whose decendants’ waveforms only collapse into discrete species when we observe them!
OK now I’m scaring myself.
November 26th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
This is a fun game (i.e. how might the flood work out logically)
I like the two entries that speculate on ways to make the volume of the ark larger, and I adore the ‘logic’ CJK used about the branching/doubling trick, as opposed to the sequential changes. And of course, the predator/prey ratios and lack of producers are obvious challenges.
One way around much of this, which may or may not be used by fundamentalists (I don’t talk to fundies often), is to say that the flood was actually a ‘local’ event, simply aimed at killing off the evil humans (who, obviously all lived in the vicinity of Noah), not all life on earth, and the creatures in the ark were only necessary for the human survivors to repopulate simply their familiar fauna in the aftermath. No need to worry about insects and fish. . .
I dunno. Whatever. It seems you really can make up anything you wish, if the laws of nature can be blithely suspended.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
RE: “Then again, I’m a slacker Buddhist, so what do I know.”
Obviously, the OT must be interpreted as literally true since anyone who is guided by the Spirit knows that homosexuality is bad and the OT condemns homosexually. While the NT must be read as metaphor or allegory. For example, a true Christian (and all the Republican presidential candidates) supports torture particularly in the wildly fictitious “ticking timebomb” scenario and since this doesn’t fit with a literal interpretation of the NT hippie garbage about peace and love it must be interpreted within a historic and cultural context and not as literal truth. Finally, if you disagree with my assertion, then you are not a true Christian, are not properly guided by the Spirit, and are choosing the wrong parts of God’s Bible to interpret as symbolism, metaphor, or allegory.
November 27th, 2007 at 1:18 am
To Jon H;
Actually, the Biblical evidence for the acceptance of Jesus as the foretold messiah is marginal at best, and utterly disingenuous at worst.
The Old Testament prophicies without fail identify the messiah with a warrior who would, in his lifetime, reunite Israel. There is also the fact of the later writings very obviously altering existing stories (Jesus rides into Jerusalem on an ass, no, wait, Jesus rides in on a mare. Dammitall, he rides in with both, and he straddles ‘em , thus fulfilling whichever damn prophecy whoever reads this crap will think applies). The overwhelming evidence of scriptures reliably dated to before the reign of Titus show that Jesus, as he is presented in the New Testament, can not possibly be the Messiah predicted by the Abrahmic prophecies.
November 27th, 2007 at 6:33 am
Not only do the ‘kinds’ have to speciate in the limited time available, they all have to migrate (somehow) to their natural ranges whilst breeding like fury to make up today’s numbers.
Perhaps god commanded them to “f**k off”.
November 27th, 2007 at 6:34 am
Jon H: Since Jesus is supposed to be the messiah prophecied in the OT, the OT is fundamental, no?
What I’d really like to know is - never mind that USS Enterprise couldn’t contain all the insect species, let alone all the other animals - where exactly did the flood water drain to?
Interestingly without plate tectonics to raise up the land, we’d all be under water to the tune of 3km or something. Plate tectonics works at the scale of cm/yr, so the timescales in the YEC manuals are just silly. But then we knew that already.
November 27th, 2007 at 8:55 am
You think you’re better than us with all your match college boy?!?!?!11
May GOD forgive you
November 27th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Maybe a better question than why no one noticed all of this “micro-evolution” is why it stopped all of a sudden, or at least stopped occurring at the same rate that it had been taking place.
There should have been about 131 new mammalian species which evolved within the last century.
Where are they?
November 27th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
“You think you’re better than us with all your match college boy?!?!?!11
May GOD forgive you”
“Better”? That’s awfully subjective. More like “smarter” perhaps.
By the way it’s “math”. And it helps if you hold down the shift key until you’ve finished typing out your ridiculous number of exclamation points.
Which, I might add, are the only points in your comment.
November 27th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
hey, a lot of the bible seems to be metaphorical, otherwise how can you explain that god creates everything on earth twice? in the first and second chapter he creates everything in a certain order then he re-creates it in a different order. if you take it metaphorically than he was describing an overview of existence on this earth and then he emphasized human importance in the second.
(i don’t have the book with me, so i cant look it up)
also, one big controversy is the whole “7 days” thing, how can we tell how he measures days? its quite possible that for god a “day” is 100,000 of our years, why not? metaphor and symbolism are abundant in older texts, and it would help someone remember the stories (the bible wasn’t written down for years and years after Jesus would have died.) so that passing it on by word of mouth was easier.
the flood could have been caused by a tidal wave that swept him away from his home town, the rain could have been caused by the ash from a volcano gathering water in the atmosphere, and in the end of it all, does it really matter if the flood never even happened? it was a story with a moral, that was its main purpose. moral: god uses nature to further his means, he used a natural disaster, he didn’t “smite” them. why break the laws of nature he supposedly created?
November 27th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Good points made.
You also have to take account of the fact that a lot of animals were taken onto the ark not two each but seven each. Seven of all the , so called ‘clean animals’ were taken on board.
Just more overcrowding problems.
In addition to that, there is the small problem of there not being enough water in our earth’s system to cover it to the level of six feet over the top of mount everest.
Just try and imagine how much water would be needed to add the last three feet.
Thanks blogger person, for this interesting piece.
Keep on blogging!
November 27th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
You’re welcome!
November 27th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Sorry, Jeffthefish, I have problems with your analysis, and cjk’s reformulation doesn’t quite do it for me either.
In the first few decades (or generations) after the flood, each of the 153 pairs could have easily produced many hundreds of in-kind individuals. Shortly after the first few such generations, young couples or small groups could have dispersed far and wide.
So the speciatin’ gets going pronto, and contrary to cjk’s doubling pattern, the micro-evolution towards the 5400 species is simultaneously underway in many different niche environments.
This allows around 4000 years for EACH species to evolve from its ancestral ark-rider, a far cry from jeff’s 1.3 species per year.
The question of polar bears and black bears and pandas micro-evolving from their common ancestral couple in 4000 years — the order of hundreds of generations — I’ll leave that to others.
I’m still working on my theory of Temporarily Vegetarian Lions, which I’ll be submitting for publication as soon as all the fine points are ironed out.
November 27th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Maybe, yaknow, it’s just an interpretation passed down from father to son where the great-great grandfather’s farm or town or living area was flooded. This great-great grandfather would have predicted or had some sort of dream that his family believed, but others didn’t, that a flood would come, so he put all of the animals onto a boat/house/protected from flood area. The people who didn’t believe said great-great grandfather drowned. That’s the most likely story, but I wouldn’t know.
Once this great-great grandfather told his children, he morphed it a little bit, and then those children told their children, and it was a little more different, until you get a man who was writing a book with a bunch of other people having a story that a man put two of every single animal in the world on the boat. I think this story is exactly the same as a “I caught a fish THIS big” story; it was just put into a book that people wanted to believe.
P.S. Also, there is a little more time for micro evolution, because the families would split off into genuses,and then those would make the final species, and therefore it would be semi-exponential, allowing a lot more time for species to evolve.
November 28th, 2007 at 2:56 am
It’s easy to solve all silly problems with the flood story. See, it was a miracle.
Do you really think you can outsmart God? The more “problems” you collect, the more you emphasise His awesome superpowers. Yay!
Some fundies actually make this argument. Adult, apparently sane people who are even able to tie their own shoes.
November 30th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
Using science to tear down a creationist argument is like using a sledgehammer to tear down a house of Play-Doh.
December 2nd, 2007 at 10:05 am
I’m sorry it took so long for me to get to reading this. This is very well thought out.
I’m wondering why you didn’t consider the theory of microcreation, though. Perhaps god is still sitting around going “poof” and making more and more new species of animals every day. Cow + Cube = Cowube.
December 4th, 2007 at 7:58 am
Jesus is magic. Get it into your heads. Besides, we’re all plugged into a God matrix anyway. He just wrote some new lines of code.
December 5th, 2007 at 4:45 am
Creationists believe in rapid speciation and it has been observed, e.g. a new mosquito species arose (’evolved’ if you want to call it that) in the British metro system.
http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3036/
1.3 speciations a year (on average) seems very possible. Although it would probably be more like 5000 speciation events in the first 500 years after the flood and the ensuing ice age. And compartively less as enviroments stabilized.
December 5th, 2007 at 8:13 am
I always heard when I was a kid, and asked this same question, was that the flood didn’t cover the entire earth. It only affected a small region, and the rest of earth was ok. So he didn’t really need many animals.
Can I warn you of the mistake in trying to use logic to argue and religious people. These are people who have a higher truth than what is actually truth. Truth to us means something that can be shown to be true, truth to them means what god says. So no amount of logic can change the way they think.
December 5th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
“where exactly did the flood water drain to?”
well, what had happened was, Pangaea, an low elevation landmass flooded right, then all the mountains, that werent even there, got covered pretty easily. the weight of all the water on the supercontinent forced a rapid movement of tectonic plates, which opened up big holes straight to the mantle, which evaporated all the water back into clouds, like really, really fast. yeah, thats what had happened.
December 12th, 2007 at 10:12 am
Then there’s the theological argument they always overlook. Why did God need a flood to wipe out the Earth? Why not just go *poof* and unmake them? Or, if he wanted to make a point with the flood for dramatic effect, why didn’t he just remake the animals after the flood like he did in genesis?
Why make humans at all if knew they were going to be bad? Why not start with Noah instead of Adam? That implies God didn’t know how humans were going to turn out. If free will was a mistake, why not just take it away and make humans do what he wanted? For that matter why would an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God every get mad, or need to be worshiped? God works in mysterious ways, I guess.
January 11th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
[…] how I did that thing with Noah’s ark and then math showed up and won? Obviously, I just made up some numbers to illustrate my point. […]
January 26th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
What is everyone trying to do? Totally destroy a system of beliefs? Even if you do, to what point and purpose will it personally benefit you? Will it really, actually change your lives in any way. Just so you know, to some people, the only thing that is even keeping them alive is the fact that there might be some kind of God. Maybe, just maybe, it is hope for them that the pain will end. If that system of beliefs is totally destroyed, then what reason is there for them to live anymore. Instead of attacking what you happen not to believe, just leave it alone and maybe start to seriously contemplate your own set of values. Don’t give them nothing to stay alive for, don’t give them no reason to live.
January 28th, 2008 at 7:06 am
William N.: I truly sympathize with what you’re saying and I struggle with that, but there are two main reasons why I think I’m doing the right thing:
First, showing why the Noah’s Ark story could not be literally true does not undermine belief in an afterlife or Christianity. I am not trying to destroy that, I’m trying to protect it.
Second, the fact that some people think they need it does not give Creationist leaders the right to lie in the name of Jesus.
January 28th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Jason,
you need to watch your grammer.
No offense.
Tootles!
January 28th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Not to my mention my grammar.
Do you think you could also mention something to Donald Prothero?
January 30th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Noah’s Ark is a true story.
It can be backed up factually.
Read my analysis here:
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=16475.msg94698#msg94698
further proof shown by Prof. Walter Veith
Evolution or Creation: What do the Rocks Reveal? The Flood?
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-5521410965822202656
February 6th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
[…] Just have to let everyone know! The tiger represents math! The crocodile represents Noah’s Ark! […]
February 12th, 2008 at 10:21 am
urdumm. the arc wuz HUGE
March 17th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
I’ve never quite understood why 4000 years was the accepted belief in the first place…are we afraid that God has a short attention span and will get bored of us after a few billion years? Time and space seems trivial in the grand scheme of a higher power. It seems to me that if you trace the lineage of humans back to Adam and Eve, there are at least a few thousand possible years missing in the in-between bits. And as for carbon-dating and what-not, God clearly could have created the Earth to APPEAR old.
And as for animals breeding at light speed and migrating crazy-fast and pausing to eat grass for awhile instead of gazelles…humans also don’t live to be 800 years old anymore either. Genetics have certainly seemingly changed fast for us as well. Seems to me that the sheer amount of breeding in animals needed to repopulate the earth could have diluted and modified the gene pool enough to cause micro-evolution to slow down. Maybe predators weren’t as meat-crazy then as they are now (plus, Noah had a supply of “clean” livestock on board to feed his family and the predators with, and the predators very well could have continued to eat that livestock after the containment, which reminds me…who says he released the animals all at once?).
Also, can we all agree that decorating your baby’s nursery in a Noah’s Ark motif is kind of messed up? Genocide? Anyone?
I personally am positive that Noah’s Ark was a myth, derived from a few truths. However, if you are going to concede that there could be a God that can create a universe and an Earth at all, then stop trying to say that whatever is written in the Bible isn’t plausible. It seems to me what some of us in this thread are really discussing is whether or not there truly is a God at all.
September 19th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
@William N. “Will it really, actually change your lives in any way?”
Short answer - Yes.
Long answer - Hell yes. At least here in the US, our citizens’ and leaders’ beliefs in Biblical passages as literal truth leads to public policy that influences every American. Not merely who is allowed to marry and what women do with their bodies, but also:
foreign relations (Israel as the obvious example.)
national defense (those with interests at odds with ours are “evil”)
social programs
criminal statutes
prayer/commandments/proselytizing in schools/prison/fed buildings
euthanasia
sex education (even ‘good touch/bad touch’ education being vilified?)
role of science/innovation
“to some people, the only thing that is even keeping them alive is the fact that there might be some kind of God” IMO to some people, fear of Biblical retribution is the thing keeping them from living, which includes creating/finding your own meaning.
“just leave it alone” I would love it were this the motto of both religious and non-religious alike (see above policies). I’m all for freedom of religion, but I’m also for the freedom of any curious soul to happen on to this thread for a open discussion. Kinda patronizing otherwise…
January 15th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
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March 21st, 2009 at 3:48 am
When you take the facts and put it in front of them they will say you cant read this like a text book but it is a story and no matter what the FACTS say, if it doesn’t fir their story they will twist it how eve many times.
The funny thing is they found the ARK and it is in TEXT BOOK FACT BASED measurements to what ti says in the bible to the last inch.
I find it difficult to believe that at one point the Bible is able to give you exact Mathematical measurements and on the other hand when you do the maths it doesn’t add up on the number of animals on the ark.
That is because in the Koran it doest say the whole world was flooded and it gives the exact location of the ark 200 miles far from the Biblical location.
“Then the word went forth: “O earth! Swallow up thy water, and O sky! Withhold (thy rain)!” and the water abated, and the matter was ended. The Ark rested on Mount Judi, and the word went forth: “Away with those who do wrong!” (The Noble Quran, 11:44).”
The Koran states that the ARK rested on MOUNT JUDI.
GOOGLE EARTH COORDINATES.
39 26’24.40N 44 14’05.19E
The Mountains of Ararat is the place named in the Book of Genesis where Noah’s ark came to rest after the great flood (Genesis 8:4)
So the BIBLE says it is in mount ARARAT!
GOOGLE EARTH COORDINATES.
39 42’19.58N 44 17’33.23E
Mount ARARAT is 200 miles from Mount JUDI!
Noah’s Ark
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE7nN80dIw8
This is why the religious community has become a joke as the Bible has been translated so many times so many errors have occurred so we cant FACE THE FACTS.
God is absolute and if MATHS & FACTS can prove things wrong then it doesn’t deserve to stand up as proof of God.