Here’s Atheist Comedy’s take on Noah’s Ark.
They make some excellent points:
- Even if Noah took out all the “variations” and only stuck with “kinds,” that would still have been over 2 billion animals.
- For a year in the ark, two elephants alone would require 365,000 lbs of food and 65,000 gal of water;
two giraffes would require 54,740 lbs of food
two lions would require 16,000 lbs of fresh meat. - If Noah took all baby animals, how would all the babies get there from around the world at the same time? Or how would all the animals have babies at the exact same time?
- If the flood covered the mountains, that would put the sea level at at 29,055 ft, where everything on the ark would have frozen to death & not had enough oxygen to breathe.
- Not even most of the sea life could survive due to the changes in temperature, pressure, sunlight, filtration, salt.
- After the flood, there would have been no vegetation for the herbivores to eat. And every time the carnivores ate, a species would go extinct.
- Two lone members of species aren’t enough to re-propagate a species. There needs to be at least 50 animals for there to be a proper amount of genetic diversity.
- So what’s the solution? MAGIC, of course!
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70 Comments
It’s just a metaphor! You’re taking it all too seriously!
And if all Christians believed that, we wouldn’t have to show how stupid this stuff is. Unfortunately, though…
What’s it a metaphor for?
Seriously – I’ve tried to puzzle out a metaphoric reading for the story of Noah’s Ark and about the only one I can come up with is that it’s yet another iteration of Israel getting the shaft from God. It follows the same pattern as a ton of the other stories in the OT – the people turn away from God, God punishes them via slaughter or exile or something else, and after a period of time God lets up and lets them rebuild. This one has the benefit of having both a horrible vicious death for most of humanity AND a period of exile for the “chosen people” – the family of Noah – who even though God lets them live still have to live in exile for 40 days and nights while God destroys everyone else. (Kind of a foreshadowing of Exodus in that respect – God slaughters the Egyptians in a flood and then makes the Israelites wait 40 years before they can stop their desert wanderings.)
So I suppose it could be another metaphor for God’s treatment of his “chosen” people. It certainly plays into the central theme of the OT as a whole. But the metaphor of a capricious, mostly powerless God who has to slaughter people to get their attention doesn’t sound like the kind of metaphor most Christians would embrace.
YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, IT’S A METAPHOR!
The problem, DDM, is that Bible-believers inconsistently interpret said book. To some people, the flood myth is metaphor, but to others it’s historical fact; both groups have the same level of conviction as to the validity of their interpretation.
So, where does that leave us? Well for starters, it makes videos like the one here both amusing and serious. You can claim it’s metaphor all you want, but your religion in general doesn’t necessarily support this view.
I’m more poking fun at the fact that if, taken as a metaphor, there’s no moral, meaning, or purpose to the story. It only has weight if it’s true.
Well, that’s not right. I guess the moral would be “DON’T FUCK WITH GOD” but there’s countless other stories about that. Hell, you could rename the whole OT “DON’T FUCK WITH GOD” and no one would notice the difference at all.
My apologies if I incorrectly assumed you to be Christian. It’s easy to misunderstand tongue-in-cheek humor and sarcasm on the intarwebz.
This exchange illustrates, once again, why it’s often difficult to sift the Christians from the Critics on the intertube thingies. :)
Tell that to these folks:
http://www.daniellesplace.com/html/bible_themes_noah.html
Well, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, but it was another year before the floodwaters receeded and they could land. And even after that, they were the only humans alive, so their “exile” didn’t really end until they’d had enough kids to rebuild society.
Where did that water recede to, anyway?
Duh! Magic-and-loving father take it away to drown another planet.
Wintermute, you surely don’t mean that we descend from cousins having sex between them, do you?
Well, the Bible says that the only humans alive were Noah, his wife, their three sons and their wives. And Ham (and presumably his wife) is driven off because he saw his father passed out drunk and naked. The next we hear, there are entire nations.
Draw your own conclusions.
MAGIC.
The same place it came from: through the windows in the sky into the waters of heaven.
I don’t understand 1-6.
7: Genetic Diversity is a myth created by stupid evolutionistic darwinists!
That must be either meant as satire or it’s a rather pathetic attempt at trolling.
Point four is just plain wrong. If the sea level rises, so does the air above it. The air would be somewhat thinner, because the same volume of air is spread over a larger sphere, but it would be nowhere near as thin as the air at 29K feet is for the current sea level.
All of the numbers in point #2 are way too high. I live in Africa and see elephants, giraffe, and lions on a regular basis. None of them require that much food or water. You don’t disprove a ridiculous claim (that the flood is a historical event) by exaggerating the numbers. You just make yourself look as ridiculous as them.
That’s in a year, chief. Personally I think those numbers are a bit low. But what can you do if not speculate?
> “what can you do if not speculate?”
Ask a zoo-keeper?
Got one handy?
Search the internet:
A lion eats an average of 8.5kg a day, which is about 7,000lb in a year. Multiply by two lions and 16,000lb sounds about right. (http://www.lionresearch.org/faq.html)
Elephants would eat about 150lb each daily, which is about 110,000lb on zoo diets (http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/AsianElephants/elephantfaq.cfm). In the wild they might eat up to 320,000lb at 440lb daily each (http://www.african-elephant.org/faq/elefaq.html#FeedingHabits).
And giraffes would eat about 55,000 lbs at 75lb each daily. (http://www.sandiegozoo.org/animalbytes/t-giraffe.html)
It depends on the amount of time spent in the ark. The Bible isn’t really clear on how long they all stay on board. It’s either 40, 150, or 40+150 days, depending on your interpretation.
Gardens, snakes, and floods, oh my! This must be Sumeria, Toto.
No need to speculate on mythopoeic connections —
Many symbolic meanings attach to ’snake’. because snakes molt — they break out of their old skins all bright and glossy — they have been used as a symbol of rebirth, regeneration for more than 4,500 years.
In the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh (2500 BCE) — it is a snake which eats a plant giving immortality. It also contains the first occurrence of “the” flood — with a Sumerian “Noah” and his family in a purpose built great boat (”ark”) the only human survivors. (Unapishtim the mariner and family)
Even earlier in “Old Europe” the snake appears not as a symbol, but as one living manifestation of a life-giving goddess, associated with drenching rain and lightning.
She comes down to us as the great goddess of Crete — bare breasted, covered waist down by a flounced skirt indicative of flowing water; in her upraised hands she hold aloft two snakes representing lightning.
See Marja Gimbutus. Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. 1982. See: currently on-going exhibition on Old Europe, http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/exhibitions/oldeurope/introduction.html
anti_supernaturalist
Somebody should point out to Christians that they haven’t invented the wheel, I mean, the flood. :D Sadly they don’t read books on mythology instead of da book.
This would be an excellent argumentative tool if it weren’t for all the obscenities. I shudder even at the thought of showing this to my parents or other people of like mind. After the first “fuck” they’d just tune out and insist I shut the nasty thing off. So much for making the case.
I do question some of the figures about how much food the animals would eat in a year. Seem a little high to me.
“# If the flood covered the mountains, that would put the sea level at at 29,055 ft, where everything on the ark would have frozen to death & not had enough oxygen to breathe.”
I don’t think that’s true; oxygen levels at that altitude are low now, but there’s nothing underneath but air. If you filled that space with water, it would be displacing air, so air at 30,000 feet wouldn’t be significantly below atmospheric pressure – it would follow Boyles law subject to the increase in volume required for the hollow sphere of atmosphere getting bigger (I’d do the maths, but I can’t be bothered – it’s 4/3 Pi r^3 if anybody wants to work it out).
Not that I think the “great flood” is anything other than total bullshit, but I don’t like to use arguments I can pick holes in myself…
Good points.
That air thing bugged me too, but I’m pretty sure he has a point with that freezing uh…point.
Mmmmm, not really. It’s so cold up there partly because the air is so thin. It would be colder because the Sun’s rays would be incident on a larger surface area, and because the ground wouldn’t absorb heat during the day and re-radiate heat at night, but I don’t think it would be that much colder. Remember, heat is just molecules wobbling – less molecules, less heat. There and again, the extra gravity due to that extra mass of water might be enough to make the air denser (and the animals knackered due to the increase in their apparent weight), so maybe it wouldn’t be colder at all.
It does not in any way follow that if there are fewer molecules, the temperature is lower. Of course, there will be less thermal energy, but that is not relevant.
There are a number of reasons the upper stratosphere is very cold, including that it is far from the surface of the Earth where thermal energy radiates out. It would not be trivial attempting to calculate the temperature at the surface of a planet covered in water more than eight kilometers higher than current levels, but it probably wouldn’t even be relevant, given the incredibly extreme weathers resulting from forty days of heavy rain (and by “heavy,” I mean two hundred meters per day. That’s more than eight meters an hour, or two millimeters per second. At that rate, the rain would exceed the average annual rainfall of Louisiana, the rainiest U.S. state, in less than thirteen minutes.).
Among other things, flood geology would result mercury poisoning for everyone:
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/mercury.htm
The numbers for the food and water required are skewed indeed. Lions for example eat about 5 – 7 kg of meat per day (or well, 20-30 kg every 3-4 days or so, they like to binge out). The Youtube clip claims they’d eat about 10 kg a day = way too much, even for a lion. I didn’t google what elephants or giraffes eat, but I’m guessing those numbers are a tad high too. Nevertheless, there’s no way that Noah could have fit all that food on his boat, even if the numbers were slashed by half.
We are allowing for a pair…?
10kg per day = right for TWO lions, though. Wouldn’t be much point in only taking the one :D
Nono, 16.000 lbs of meat for a pair of lions = 10 kg of meat for each one per day. I checked! :P The numbers are too high, unless he wants to really fatten them up.
Buuut doesn’t really matter anyway, since the amount of food needed for all those animals is the least of Noah’s problems…
Um… 2.2 lbs per kilo, so 16/2.2 = 7.27 KG
Methinks your maths has gone squiffy!
Argh, this is how I did it (with the help of google..), point out the squiffiness please, I’m more of a linguist than a mathematician
16000 pounds to kg = approx. 7257 kg of meat for 2 lions for 1 year
7257 kg / 2 = 3628 kg of meat for 1 lion for 1 year
3628 kg / 365 = 9.9 kg of meat for 1 lion for 1 year
The elephants are a bit easier to calculate, I’m pretty sure an elephant does NOT eat 500 lbs of food per day, even if they are big animals. Especially not if it doesn’t have to move at all, just stand in its place for a year inside that ark (unless Noah took the animals for a walk sometimes?)
*3628 / 365 = 9.9 kg of meat for 1 lion for 1 DAY* not year
Ah, confusion because you said 16.000 instead of 16,000 and you followed it with a “per day”/
You’ve got to home he took all the animals for a walk every day. After all, spending a year cooped up in a small box unable to move would basically mean that their leg muscles would atrophy, requiring serious physical therapy before they could walk of the ark…
Arg. “You’ve got to hope“. Sorry.
The ‘overestimate’ will be reduced by increasing the number of animals : Gen 7:2 says 7 pairs of animals (clean) ; the 2 number is only unclean….as I understand,the additional were to be used for eating and sacricial offerings….
The number may not be exact but even if you cut them 10 fold you still wont be able to fit them on the ark.
Look it can be very easily explained.
The ark uses Timelord technology like the TARDIS and is bigger in the inside. LOL
I have a problem wit the amount of water. If you fill the Earth with water as high as the highest mountain then it also means it gains mass and will change orbit around the sun I think. It should orbit faster since the gravitational pull gets bigger of the added mass towards the sun.
Um no. The orbit of the earth is solely based on the distance from the sun. A star is just so massive that the mass of the planet is insignificant. I’m not entierly sure what it would do to surface gracity as you are both adding more mass and increasing the diameter of the planet at the same time.
Well, the orbit of the Earth is based on its distance from the sun, then sun’s mass, and the Earth’s orbital speed. The three are related by GM/r = v^2, where G is the gravitational constant, M is the sun’s mass, r is the orbital radius, and v is the speed.
Well, technically that is assuming Newtonian mechanics and a roughly circular orbit, both of which are very good approximations of the Earth-sun system.
However, I do think adding so much mass would greatly affect the moon’s orbit, not to mention the tides.
Indeed. And we haven’t even touched on the problem of where all the extra water came from or where it is supposed to go when the flood subsides. Genesis is not so big on conservation of mass here.
Let’s calculate it.
The Earth’s mean radius is 6371 km. Disregard the retarded “flood geology” that claims pre-Flood mountains were lower than today, let’s add 10 km of water (making the radius 6381 km) in order to cover the tallest mountains, fulfilling the Bible’s claims.
There’s a 0.47 % difference between the volumes of the two spheres. But more interestingly, if we subtract the smallest sphere we find that we’ve added
3,831,491,207 km3 of water ~ 3.83*10^21 kg. Earth’s estimated mass is 5.9736*10^24 kg (thanks, Wikipedia), so we’ve added 0.064 % to the mass. I doubt this makes much of a difference to the Moon’s orbit.
Actually the ark would be cooked not frozen. Adding 29,055 ft of water would displace 29,055 ft of air. Doing this in 40 days would mean very rapid increases in temperature and pressure at the ocean surface.
This thread demonstrates why atheists are just so fecking right: We’re willing to demolish our own arguments if we think they’re erroneous.
We rule. Yes, we do.
Group atheist hug!
Stop touching me.
That’s Catholics you’re thinking of.
My pants are tight.
That’s sort of part of the problem that I have with the video. It makes some good points but the science behind them doesn’t seem to be water tight (no pun intended). I think in the comments, that the author admits this but it’s the sort of thing that creationists will jump on to prove that the great flood really did happen.
What would atheists do without religion? I suppose they would find another group to obsess over. ;)
Happy new year brothers and sisters!
They’d probably get on with non-collecting stamps. You’re question speaks volumes.
And you’re spelling speaks volumes.
/schizophrenia
Troll Troll Troll, trying to drive up your site hits I see.
The dwade school of marketing I think it’s know as …
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:
When you guys stop trying to teach this crap in schools, when you stop wanting it treated on equal footing with science, when it stops being a litmus test for public office, and when no one is killing anyone else over differences of interpretation. . .
Honestly? I won’t give a shit what you guys believe anymore.
Until theb? Yeah, we’ll keep pointing out how stupid it all is.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:
When you guys stop trying to teach this crap in schools, when you stop wanting it treated on equal footing with science, when it stops being a litmus test for public office, and when no one is killing anyone else over differences of interpretation. . .
Honestly? I won’t give a shit what you guys believe anymore.
Until then? Yeah, we’ll keep pointing out how stupid it all is.
Its worth saying twice. :)
That was a funny mistake, I admit. :)
Bleh, this Dino clown is a hit and run artist. The minute someone bothers to answer his silly drive by posts with actual substance, he vanishes like a roach when the lights are flipped on.
“What would atheists do without religion?”
Any collective group has a need for conflict and enemies, the need for more, the need to be right against others who are wrong and so on. Sooner or later, the collective ie (Atheists, Catholics, Lutherans etc.) will come into conflict with other collectives, because it unconsciously seeks conflict and it needs opposition to define its boundary and thus its identity. The same question could be worded, what would religious groups do without non-believers, abortionists, devils or hell for that matter? Good verses evil – eternal bliss verses eternal suffering. It is “Us” against “Them”. It is the “Them” that defines “Us”.
BTW on this topic, I’m surprised insects weren’t mentioned. Let alone catching them, keeping a very, very small fraction of insects alive would be an unbelievable problem, so unimaginable that there would have to be a good dose of magic involved to accomplish it.
Regarding #2:
One of my professors got the chance to interview Ken Ham (the founder of Answers in Genesis, the group responsible for the Creation Museum). To paraphrase my professor:
“I was asking him questions that were increasingly ridiculous. It got to the point where I asked him, and I quote, ‘how many sheep would a T-Rex have to eat per day to say alive on the ark?’ He looked at me with a straight face and said ‘Well, before The Fall, all animals were herbivores, so they have the capabilities to revert back to that state if necessary. So Noah just took enough grain to feed them, which took up less space and resources.’ Of course, how silly of me.”
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