What I consider to be the best refutation to Noah's ark :)

[Skeptic]

I looked this up recently, there are 1,263,186 species of animals accounted for today (excluding fish). But we know that 99.9% of all the animals who ever lived have gone extinct. So Noah would have had to take 12.6 billion species of animals onto the ark, if you're a literal biblical young earth creationist. So multiply that by 2 and you get around 25 billion animals on a boat that according to Genesis was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet tall. I rounded up the cubic footage from 1.5 million ft3 to 2 million ft3 (to be charitable ) and that leaves an average of .00008 cubic feet of space per animal. That is less than a pencil eraser. Oh and don't forget they had to have food, and Noah and his family needed a place to live for 150 days as well.

[donnyton]

Time to play Jesus Advocate:

The bible never says Noah took every species of animals that existed, it said that he took two of every "kind" of animal. It is possible that wolves, hyenas, and dogs were included under a single animal and Noah only needed to take a small percentage of all animals. Besides God is all powerful so he could have given them a "push" to evolved into many more species later on.

[eebamxela]

Time to play Jesus Advocate:

The bible never says ..... species later on.

I hope you cleared your browser cache, and did a virus scan on your computer after you posted this. Oh and then took a scalding hot shower.

[Eilonnwy]

I personally like the idea that Noah's ark was like a bag of magic.

[donnyton]

Time to play Jesus Advocate:

The bible never says ..... species later on.

I hope you cleared your browser cache, and did a virus scan on your computer after you posted this. Oh and then took a scalding hot shower.

I've studied plenty of apologetics as a previous believer...I even have some of Ken Ham's books. I'm pretty sure that if I wanted to, I could debate myself and present accurate arguments from both sides if I wanted.

[DallasHeathen]

Besides God is all powerful so he could have given them a "push" to evolved into many more species later on.

I've always liked the irony in that animals can't evolve over hundreds of millions of years, but just in the last, what, 4000 years since the ark, the bear kind has branched out into polar bears, black bears, grizzlies, etc., and the wolves have branched out into all kinds of canines. If they just accepted that kind of evolution, it all could have happened in just a million years or so, from single cells to modern animals (or "molecules to man" as the creationists like to say).

[7od]

I've always liked the irony in that animals can't evolve over hundreds of millions of years, but just in the last, what, 4000 years since the ark, the bear kind has branched out into polar bears, black bears, grizzlies, etc., and the wolves have branched out into all kinds of canines. If they just accepted that kind of evolution, it all could have happened in just a million years or so, from single cells to modern animals (or "molecules to man" as the creationists like to say).

and i guess all the marsupials built their own boat and sailed off to australia after the flood.

[helo darqness]

Eddie Izzard, maybe the greatest comedian ever, on the flood:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFdmG-TRxzE

i saw him live last year, and he did this, but added a bit about how the lions and tigers and bears ate everyone else. he does i alot better.

(if you arent familiar with his comedy, it is meant to be very ADD and surreal...bear with it, though he isnt for everyone)

*the long-ear bit, was a reference to an earlier joke where dogs with floppy ears stick their heads out of windows because it looks good in photographs.

[clippo]

My offer for best refutation is: What do all these animals and people eat after they get off the ark? All the plant life on earth has been killed by the flood. Seems like the writers of this story maybe didn't know that plants need air too.

[Marathon]

My offer for best refutation is: What do all these animals and people eat after they get off the ark? All the plant life on earth has been killed by the flood. Seems like the writers of this story maybe didn't know that plants need air too.

The problem here is that you're dealing with magic. Any problem you can come up with can easily be explained away by saying God did it.

No plants? God made some grow after the water went away. Problem solved.

[eimerian]

The most sound argument against the ark I know of is this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIlWKp44T50

In this video it is shown that Cheetahs went through a population bottleneck in the recent past and as a result of this suffer under the effects of inbreeding.

We would expect to see the same effects in every animal if they were all reduced to two individuals 2300 BC.

[ZenMondo]

the thing that gets me about Noah's ark is not just the assertion that he took two of every kind of animal, but a few verses later it claims he took two of every "unclean" animal and 7 of every "clean" animal.

But it never explains how Noah would know what animals were clean and unclean as God had not yet told Moses the laws describing what was clean and unclean.

[Cephus]

My offer for best refutation is: What do all these animals and people eat after they get off the ark? All the plant life on earth has been killed by the flood. Seems like the writers of this story maybe didn't know that plants need air too.

According to the creationists, and yes it is a stupid idea, God made all the animals eat the rotting animal carcasses that littered the planet until the plants started to grow again. But you have to remember that the ancient Hebrews didn't consider plants to be alive in the same sense as animals and in their way of thinking, when the waters receded, the plants were probably happily growing already.

That's what happens when you rely on a scientifically-illiterate Bronze-age myth.

[DallasHeathen]

[tktt]

I think the best response to Noah's ark is questioning the whole reason, why god should create a global flood.
Even if a god wanted to wipe out most of the worlds population, an omnipotent god would have so many more effective methods of doing it. A god could have just caused all those people to vanish and fade out of existence instantly, or something like that.

This does not really refute the Noah's ark tale, but it puts christians into a difficult position, because now they need to start making excuses why their god should use a flood instead of some other killing method.

The most common christian response that I have seen, is that people in the world were so sinful and corrupt that the god wanted to make them suffer and caused the flood so they would die slowly by drowning instead of dying instantly.
This puts christians into position where they need to themselves portray their god as a sadist to make their mythology to make sense.