Sunday, May 30, 2010

On the Impossibility of the Noah's Ark Tale

Noah's Ark. The fable of a 600 or so year old man taking two of every species of non human animal, placing them on a giant wooden boat which he built, and surviving a global flood perpetuated by an angry, omniscient (wait, but if he's omnisc- I know, I know.....just forget it) aboard this giant ship. A silly tale that the majority of Christians have had to admit could never have happened. Yet, and maybe you have to admire their tenacity, there are still those who cling tight to this tale like Noah clinging tight to the sides of his ship as it rocked violently in the ravaging waters that covered the entire (flat, according to the Bible, the greatest science book of all time) Earth.

Guess what people?

It could never have happened.

There are a multitiude of reasons why this is so, and we've all heard several of them. I'm sure most, if not all of those who believe that this tale is literally true or at least profess to) have heard several of them. They probably have a fair amount of practice defending the story against these claims. Hell, Noah's Ark apologist could probably qualify as being resume worthy for some of these people.

Well, get ready to sharpen your apologist skills, because I've got more for ya'!

Now, before I get to the meat of this, let me quickly run through some of the most common, classic arguments as to why this story could not possibly have happened.

  • No one could live to be almost a thousand years old. It's not possible.
  • There's no way a wooden boat of that size would have been built (by one guy!!), let alone functional.
  • How, exactly, did he acquire two of every species, from all across the Earth?
  • How did these species survive? What did they eat? What did the carnivores eat? The anteaters?
  • What about the climactic requirements these animals had (have)? There are some species that require 100% (or near 100%) humidity to survive (cave dwellers).
  • Not a single one of these animals, insects, etc died aboard this ship?
And so on, and so forth.

That alone should suffice, really. I mean, come on, my 18 month old daughter wouldn't buy this shit. But no, I must press onwards.....dare I say, atheist soldier? (oh take a joke).


Fine, let's kick this into overdrive.

  1. Everything alive would have suffocated. How could they breathe with all of the plants on earth dead?
  2. There's not enough water on the planet to flood the entire Earth up to the highest mountain peaks.
  3. The ice caps would not exist in their current form, as there would not have been enough time for them to form in this climate. They would have to form, as the buoyancy of the water would have floated the polar caps off their beds and caused them to break apart. The climate in the last 5000 years has been too warm for the ice caps to have reformed to their current size and density.
  4. If the entire Earth flooded, that would mean that salt and freshwater mixed together. This would have resulted in the salination of ALL the water on Earth. There are fish, coral reef and plants who NEED fresh water to survive, and there are fish, coral reef and plants who NEED salt water to survive. This would have resulted in catastrophe for plants, coral reef and fish. These are mutually exclusive inhabitants. They wouldn't survive in a planet with consisted of nothing but salinated water.
  5. Absolutely no evidence of a flood in tree ring data.
  6. Unequal mountain erosion? How?
  7. Ice cores from Greenland contain no layer of sediments, which you would have seen if the entire planet had been flooded. The salinity levels never changed.
  8. Egyptian civilization was in full swing during this time, building pyramids, living life. No great extinction, and not one mention of a global flood. Huh.
  9. So, since all of the plants would have died due to being flooded with salinated water (not that the salinity actually matters, being flooded with water alone would do it), aside from the suffocation issue, how exactly did the herbivores survive once the flood was over? What did they eat?
Don't trust science? Okay........How about Genesis itself?

Genealogies in Genesis put the Tower of Babel about 110 to 150 years after the Flood. How, in 110-150 years, did the human population grow large enough to build this tower.....and an entire city around it?

And of course, in addition to this, there needed to be enough people to build the aforementioned Pyramids,  and populate the rest of the world, which we know had people spread out far and wide, due to historical records.

You can be a Christian all you want, but at least have the courage to admit that the Noah's Ark tale is just that. A tale, and a laughable one at that. Hearing grown adults actually trying to posit that it actually transpired, and even coming up with such insipid apologist arguments such as the water canopy defense, as I call it, is frankly fucking sad and pathetic. They sound like 4 year olds.

Your Christianity doesn't make you sound ridiculous (at least not overly so). Your literal belief in every facet of the bible does. Stop denying reality and step just a tad bit forward into the light. It was called the Enlightenment for a reason.

Dare I say, Amen?

8 comments:

  1. Very good dude.
    Oh it's ChessRedEagle by the way.

    Fear not, I am not one of the people that thought Noah's Ark was real.
    I've never met anyone who thought so. Christians call it a parable for a reason.

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  2. Hey dude, what's up? If you would have asked me, I would have surmised that no, you don't accept the story in a literal sense. You're not you know...stupid and insane ;)

    As for people actually believing it (or claiming to) they do exist, and I have had interactions with them. Cognitive dissonance is their friend XD

    Thanks for dropping by and thanks for the feedback. Btw, I am going to be making a YT vid this week, hopefully, and I am interested to hear your opinions on it. It's not religion related this time, it's about drugs.

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  3. cool. I will check it out.

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  4. You know, Greek Mythology actually accounts not 1, not 2, but 3 cataclysms? Only difference is, we know it's Mythology and don't claim it to be actual world history.

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  5. Huh, I wasn't aware of that. Thanks.

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  6. As a fun fact, Plato coined the word Mythos-Logis, and routinely associated the concept with fictional stories that told aesop-al stories. Many times refered to as the psyke-logis, or simply, psychology of the time.

    The Noah story is simply a collection of bits of facts and accounts of other stories both from Greek and African origin about flooding.

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  7. You have an error in your second sentence. He did not take "species" he took "kinds". lrn2read

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  8. 'Kinds' is a misnomer, retard.

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