deux

I understand. There is much in the bible that, if asked to just blindly believe, I wouldn't. my heart can't believe what my mind cannot accept.

my definition of faith is "Trusting in something you have reason to believe is true". First, for me to have faith in something, I have to have reason (evidence) for it to be true (correspond to reality). If it doesn't, I reject it. Which is why I'm so open to debating these things, because if I'm wrong, I wanna know so I can change my thinking.

Noah's ark? okay. This will be a long post, so bear with me.

First, there's no indication that Noah didn't have any help in building this ark of his. God of course helped, namely by supplying the blueprints. God told Noah that the ark was supposed to be 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits tall. A cubit was a standard unit of measurement in ancient times. it corresponded to the length of your arm from the tip of the middle finger with your fingers extended to the tip of your elbow. I just measured mine, and it came out to be 18 inches. Scholars both secular and sacred estimate a cubit could have been anywhere from 17.5 inches to 24 inches in length, but let's stick with our 18 inches for now. That makes this ark 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. God also said that there were to be rooms in the ark and it was to have 3 decks. This is a volume of 1.52 million cubic feet, or the equivalent of 522 railroad stock cars, each of which can hold 240 sheep.

The bible says that Noah was to take aboard all the kinds of birds, all the kinds of beasts (Hebrew word behemeh, where we get our word Behemoth; the word refers to land animals with vertebrae in general) and the kinds of "creeping things", which probably meant insects and reptiles. Fish, Sea mammals, and other aquatic life were not specified. The word "Kinds" in the bible usually refers to genus, not species. The bible indicates that many animals were created and they were created with the capability for great variability within their kind. take dogs for example; a Chihuhua and a St. Bernard are vastly different looking, but they are the same kind of animal (dog). it is possible that Noah had one dog type of animal, one horse type, one cow type, etc. and all the current species came from those kinds. Many species can breed with their kind as well, with varying degrees of success; Tigers and Lions can breed and produce ligers or Tigons, A horse and a Donkey can breed to produce a mule. there hasn't been many attempts at cross breeding, so it's hard to say how far into a kind various species can go, but it's not out of the question.

Today we have discovered about 1 to 2 million species of non plant life. This includes fungi, sea animals, etc.; things that were not taken on the ark. Unfortunately I don't have a handy reference as to how many actual species would be taken on the ark, but it was something like 50,000 total, not including insects. Insects weren't included in that total because they A) the number assumes that "creeping things" only means reptiles and some amphibians) and B) even if all 500,000 species were taken aboard, they would take up minimal space on the ark due to their size (the largest insects are no bigger than small rodents). If we are going to say that Noah only needed to bring on the "kinds" or Genuses, rather than the Species, we can narrow that down to about 8,000.

We also don't have to assume that adults were brought on board; The bible doesn't say this was so, and for these animals to have a good chance, it would be beneficial for them to be young to insure a good chance at having the most offspring. Most of the kinds that would be on the ark are about the size of a sheep or smaller, and even our largest land animals are about the size of a mule at birth (elephants). Incidentally dinosaurs, which were assumed to be on the ark as well, are very tiny when they are born. From eggs we have found that were fossilized, many of them were no bigger than a football. And there are only 87 genuses of the big big plant eaters like that brachiosaurus listed in books, and some of them could be misclassed.

the bible says clean animals were to be brought in by sevens. The bible gives good description of what clean and unclean were, and so the vast majority of what would be on the ark would be on in pairs. if we assume that most of the animals were sheep sized, and we have about 100,000 animals (50,000 speciesx2) on board, roughly 80% of the ark would be filled given it's cargo capacity. if we assume that only the genuses were taken on, only about 14% of the ark would be filled with animals. Now, that's assuming that every animal, whether species or genus, would be taking up the space of a sheep, which most of them wouldn't.

Noah was told how to build the ark by God, but God didn't build it for him. However, Noah did have 3 sons who went on the ark, and it is most likely they helped him as well. In fact, there is no reason that Noah couldn't have contracted workers from the general populous to work for him. They did mock him for what he was doing, but if someone offered to pay you good money for something, even if you thought it was stupid, odds are you'd take the job. Noah had been given 120 years from the time God gave him the blueprints to the time the flood came, so there is ample time to get the job done. Consider our vast skyscrapers, with a crew of maybe 100 people working on one they can be erected within the space of a few years. I read a statistical analysis that if Noah had 20 people working for him, working 6 days a week for 8 hours a day, everything from the cutting of the trees to the nailing them together, the whole job from resource creation to assembly would only take 69 years.

As for Noah being able to get all the animals he needed on the boat, there is evidence from the plate tectonic theory that the entire landmass on earth at one point was a single continent, which we have named Pangaea. It is possible that before the flood this supercontinent existed, and that due to the catastrophic influences of a great deluge (the bible says the mountains were raised up and the valleys made low when the waters were being receded) the current continental configuration immerged. So, Noah wouldn't have the problem of getting kangaroos to the Middle East from Australia, or Raccoons from North America. Further, Animals do have within them a sort of innate "disaster warning" system. they tend to make themself scarce before volcanoes and earthquakes, and could have sensed that the flood was emminent and headed to safety. God could have influenced them to seek out Noah all on their own accord. Many Animals, notably birds, exhibit complex migrating patterns. Some species will travel thousands of miles to mate, only to travel the same distance when born (say, the giant sea turtle). This mechanic could have been intensified miraculously by God to get the animals where they needed to be.

also, they were on the ark for about a year. Food would only take up about 15% of the ark's volume for that many creatures for that amount of time.

Also, while the bible doesn't say that the animals hibernated while on the ark, there is no reason that they couldn't have. a great many animals do hibernate, and this also could have been enhanced, eliminating the need for a lot of cleaning and care related maintenance.

That's all for today. I've been typing for ages it feels like! It's all good, I had fun writing this all up. Tomorrow I'll answer the last three questions and any more you had about this part.

holy motherfucking cow!

you've posted while I've been gone.

nice to see you.

come back soon. I miss you tons.



p.s. there is a shitload in my life that's changed since you were gone. we need to catch up!