@Gord777 recently asked Did you know that Science (Knowledge) Only Proves what the Bible Teaches and has been teaching for thousands of years? in which one of the examples he gave was about the dimensions of Noah's Ark, and I decided to write my first myTake in a while to expound upon my views about the flood tale.
I stated there, and maintain that none of the Noachean flood myth is at all believable and here will give and expound upon a few reasons why.
First I think it of utmost import that I describe what happened as many people are actually incredibly confused about the events described in Genesis 6-8. So briefly, when Noah was 500-600 years old God decided to destroy every living thing on earth because man was incredibly wicked in his eyes (6:7; 6:13). Then God commands Noah to build an ark with specific dimensions (6:15) and tells Noah to take seven of every clean animal and bird, and 2 of every unclean animal (7:2-3). The water then fell for 40 days and nights (7:17) and drowned out all life (7:21). Noah and his family and the animals were in the ark for a little over a year (7:11-8:14).
Now that that's out of the way I'll address three big issues with this tale.
1.) Contradictions
I think perhaps the most damaging to the person's who believe in the Noachean flood tale are the contradictions within the text. I will focus on three in particular.
Firstly, in Genesis 6:3 God says, "My Spirit will not contend with[a] humans forever,for they are mortal[b]; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.” Then just a few moments later we are informed that Noah was 600 years old when the flood came (7:6) and lived a total of 950 years (9:29). Then his son Shem lived 500 years (11:11) and his son Aphraxad lived 403 years (11:13) and his son Shelah also lived 403 years (11:15) so on and so forth for several chapters this statue of limitations on life is consistently flouted. This is at least the case until where I stopped reading for the purposes of this myTake with Ishmael in 25:17 who lived 137 years.
Secondly, there's also the obvious contradiction of God destroying all life on the planet (7:21-23) with water in fact covering even the tallest mountains to a depth of 15 cubits (7:20) and the Dove of 8:11 being able to return with a freshly plucked olive branch as though the flood did not kill off vegetation.
The last, is one which I don't find to be as much of a contradiction, but it certainly does contradict the common lore that is taught to Christians. In 6:19-21 where God tells Noah to only take a single pair of each animal, bird, and the general "living creatures", and where God tells Noah to take 7 pairs of each clean animal and bird into the ark. This obviously multiplies the amount of space and food needed.
2.) Logistics
The logsistics of how the ark is to be maintained and allow all the animals/ people on board to survive simply does not work at all. I'll focus on food, methane, and work needed.
Food: I'll just take a few examples to show how ludicrous this idea would be. Your average cow eats 25 lbs a day. Multiply that by 14 (pair of 7) and that's 350lbs of food daily. Multiply that by at least 365 days and that means that just for the cows alone you'd have to have at least 127,000lbs of food! We'll just take one more. The horse eats an average of 15-20lbs daily. Do the same math and you get 75,000lbs of food needed! Just these two kosher animals would require over 200,000lbs of food for this voyage! You average bale of hay weighs 50lbs and is 3 feet long and 1 foot tall. Thus we have a total of 4000 bales of hay totaling 12,000 feet long and 4000 feet in height and 4000 in depth. The Ark as described in Genesis 6:15 is only 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. Do you see the problem? This is only taking the food for two animals alone and not counting the size or total number of animals. These animals aren't even the biggest, imagine the problem when you start counting elephants and hippos which eat almost 8-40 times as much!
Can't breathe! Genesis 6:16 only allows for a single 1.5ft large window in the Ark. This would not provide sufficient ventilation for the animals or people on the Ark. Forget not that many creatures expel methane as a waste product meaning that if everything didn't die from asphyxiation, then the slightest spark or candle would cause an explosion leading the Ark to "kingdom come". (If someone wants to do those calculations more power to you, but my math skills aren't quite good enough for that and I couldn't get the pdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234684994_The_Impossible_Voyage_of_Noah's_Ark
Work: Could you imagine the man hours required to feed and clean up after all of these animals? This beggars all belief. We'll stick with my two animals before 200,000 lbs of food and 650,000 lbs of waste! With 8 people on board the ark they'd have to each haul 106,000 lbs of food or waste in a year, or 290lbs daily. Let's say at a steady pace they could move an lb of either every five seconds (disregard where the food is coming from or going). That would have each person working for more than 24 hours each day. This is again to only take care of two animals.
I was going to go into more, but my time at work is coming to a close and I don't want to risk losing all of this on my ride home. If my math is wrong please correct me. The doctor says my skill at math isn't all that great.
I'd recommend this series if you're interested in someone who's far better at explaining the many problems than I.
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