Noah's Ark and non-animals

[Otto Kretschmer]

The story of Noah's Ark says that Noah took either 2 or 7 of each kind of animal in the world on the ark.

Even when we don't take the utter logistical absurdity of such an endevour, that's not the end of the problem.

The story states that animals were on the ark. This means vertebrates and invertebrates - yet in our ecosystem there are also plants, fungi bacteria and viruses - and a few others.

 

How do literalists explain this? Did Noah also have a massive seed bank on the Ark and petri dishes with smallpox and bubonic plague? 

[Eise]

And they lost the dinosaurs...

[exchemist]

1 hour ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

The story of Noah's Ark says that Noah took either 2 or 7 of each kind of animal in the world on the ark.

Even when we don't take the utter logistical absurdity of such an endevour, that's not the end of the problem.

The story states that animals were on the ark. This means vertebrates and invertebrates - yet in our ecosystem there are also plants, fungi bacteria and viruses - and a few others.

 

How do literalists explain this? Did Noah also have a massive seed bank on the Ark and petri dishes with smallpox and bubonic plague? 

You are shooting fish in a barrel. We don’t have any biblical literalists on the forum to kick around, and I doubt anyone here will have the patience to hunt down the silly arguments these people try, just so we can all agree they are cobblers. 
 

Biblical literalists, in my experience, are very ignorant people, often even cultivating ignorance to avoid confronting the obvious problems. I used to post on a religious forum and there were people there who refused to learn, simply ignoring inconvenient issues even when they had been carefully and simply explained. Logical argument is water off a duck’s back to them.

[Otto Kretschmer]

@exchemist

This subforum is for discussing religion. There is no practical difference between discussing Biblical literalism and discussing other aspects of religion.

[joigus]

Since when do you need Petri dishes to carry microorganisms around?

Utnapishtim's contemporaries strike me as good candidates for plausible carriers of those.

IMO, you're flogging a dead horse two and a half meters from it.

[swansont]

3 hours ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

The story of Noah's Ark says that Noah took either 2 or 7 of each kind of animal in the world on the ark.

Even when we don't take the utter logistical absurdity of such an endevour, that's not the end of the problem.

The story states that animals were on the ark. This means vertebrates and invertebrates - yet in our ecosystem there are also plants, fungi bacteria and viruses - and a few others.

 

How do literalists explain this? Did Noah also have a massive seed bank on the Ark and petri dishes with smallpox and bubonic plague? 

Not to defend the Bible as being literally true, but this is an argument from silence, i.e. a fallacy. (related: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence)

Does the Bible say how much food and water/wine Noah loaded on board? Or how many times they urinated/defecated? Do we assume the answer is zero because it’s not mentioned?

[Phi for All]

5 hours ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

The story states that animals were on the ark. This means vertebrates and invertebrates -

Does it? Where else in the book does it make these kinds of biological distinctions? 

Also, Genesis 6:21 mentions that Noah's god told him to gather food for his family and the animals, which presumably included fruits and vegetables, which means seeds. And after the "flood", Noah becomes a farmer with a vineyard. 

I'm with swansont, I'm not a biblical apologist and I certainly don't think any of it is true, but I think there are PLENTY of other questionable bits regarding "the flood" to focus on. 

[zapatos]

5 hours ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

The story of Noah's Ark says that Noah took either 2 or 7 of each kind of animal in the world on the ark.

 

In all the photographs I've seen of Noah loading the ark, I don't ever remember seeing them loading aquariums, fish, whales, etc.

[TheVat]

9 minutes ago, zapatos said:

In all the photographs I've seen of Noah loading the ark, I don't ever remember seeing them loading aquariums, fish, whales, etc.

Well it was a flood.  😉

5 hours ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

The story states that animals were on the ark. This means vertebrates and invertebrates - yet in our ecosystem there are also plants, fungi bacteria and viruses - and a few others.

 

Of those taxa, which seem most prone to drowning?  LoL.

[zapatos]

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

Well it was a flood.  😉

Yes, but I saw no footnote saying 'except for those animals in the water or air or whatever would be kind of silly'. Although I guess it is just possible that we were not meant to take the story literally.

[Phi for All]

1 minute ago, zapatos said:

Although I guess it is just possible that we were not meant to take the story literally.

My exact thought when I saw which insects are OK to eat and which are unclean. Whole lot of conflicting scriptures there! No winged insects at all, except you can eat locusts and katydids, because they hop as well as fly. I would think flying insects, not spending as much time in the dirt, would be cleaner than crawling insects. Go figure.

[Ken Fabian]

5 hours ago, joigus said:

IMO, you're flogging a dead horse two and a half meters from it.

Five cubits away maybe.

[joigus]

21 minutes ago, Ken Fabian said:

Five cubits away maybe.

Yeah, that's more Utnapishtimian?

[Ken Fabian]

3 hours ago, zapatos said:

Although I guess it is just possible that we were not meant to take the story literally.

It probably was originally meant to be taken seriously, told by people with limited knowledge of the wider world and poor arithmetic to people not so good at arithmetic too, who would be expected to be awed and terrified of and submissive to a God so powerful and so inclined to harsh collective punishments... and submissive to God's priests (who were also inclined to brutal collective punishments?). Having details like how large would reinforce the idea that it was a true account of a real event but I doubt there was encouragement to think it through and indulge in criticism.

[J.C.MacSwell]

 

8 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Five cubits away maybe.

Also a couple of unicorns...not a horse

[Sensei]

In a thread similar to this one,~ ten years ago, I calculated that there is not enough ice/water in the entire Solar System to cover the entire Earth with Himalayas.

Also water has to go somewhere after flooding. Did it disappear?

The flood, however, is not a myth. It is a real event that took place, which has been embellished and fabricated by storytellers over millennia of passing these tales of the past on to each other

For example, it was possible to go from Europe to Britain and Ireland barefoot.

The water level was 120 meters lower than today. After the melting of the glaciers that covered the entire world, water flooded the coastal areas.

If a similar event happened today and the water surface would rise another 120 meters Paris, Berlin and Warsaw would be under water. Do you know where Paris, Berlin and Warsaw are, right? Practically in the middle of the countries.. Hundreds of kilometers from the coastline..

Edited Saturday at 10:20 AM by Sensei

[exchemist]

36 minutes ago, Sensei said:

In a thread similar to this one,~ ten years ago, I calculated that there is not enough ice/water in the entire Solar System to cover the entire Earth with Himalayas.

Also water has to go somewhere after flooding. Did it disappear?

The flood, however, is not a myth. It is a real event that took place, which has been embellished and fabricated by storytellers over millennia of passing these tales of the past on to each other

For example, it was possible to go from Europe to Britain and Ireland barefoot.

The water level was 120 meters lower than today. After the melting of the glaciers that covered the entire world, water flooded the coastal areas.

If a similar event happened today and the water surface would rise another 120 meters Paris, Berlin and Warsaw would be under water. Do you know where Paris, Berlin and Warsaw are, right? Practically in the middle of the countries.. Hundreds of kilometers from the coastline..

Yes, if we want to get some science into this thread, I suppose we could discuss the possible origins of the Middle Eastern flood myth. Seasonal flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates is perhaps the most likely origin. However the way the Mediterranean and Black Sea refilled after the end of the last Ice Age are two other ideas.

One I rather like is the refilling of the Persian Gulf, which would have involved an encroachment of the Arabian sea through the Straits of Hormuz. Someone calculated this would have spread up the shallow floor of the Gulf, along the banks of what would have been, at that time, the continuation of the Shatt al Arab, at a rate of advance of  1km/yr, i.e. 3 metres per day, for hundreds of years. That would have displaced people living on the banks and might have been a traumatic experience for the population. This would have been between 12000 and 6000 yrs ago, so within possible folk memory.

Edited Saturday at 10:42 AM by exchemist

[Genady]

As the Earth was considered a flat disk, it was obvious where the water went after flooding. Moreover, it is possible to estimate the size of the disk based on the time it took the water to subside.

[studiot]

20 hours ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

The story states that animals were on the ark.

It also include birds; don't know if you include them in animals ?

 

Just now, exchemist said:

Seasonal flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates is perhaps the most likely origin.

Don't think it was seasonal. The excavations of Sir Leonard Woolley established that there was a significant one off flood extending the northwestern end of the Persian Gulf by some 400 miles in length and 100 miles in width.

This was derived from the discovery of a layer of clay deposit, separating two civilisations, wiping out the older underneath.

[iNow]

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

I suppose we could discuss the possible origins of the Middle Eastern flood myth. Seasonal flooding

Nearly every major human civilization grew around water sources as a method of helping agriculture, trade, and commerce. Given the likelihood of living near large bodies of water, pretty much every one of them has been hit by devastating floods at some point (even many points) in their history and those stories get sung down the generations. Flood myth is are common and easy to explain. 

You I’m sure know this, just jumping off your comment. It’s harder to find a civilization without a flood myth than to explain the origins of them. 

[LuckyR]

This entire topic is ridiculous on it's face. The total possible sea rise if all ice on Earth melted is 70 feet. Mt Ararat is about 16,000 feet high. 

[TheVat]

11 minutes ago, LuckyR said:

This entire topic is ridiculous on it's face. The total possible sea rise if all ice on Earth melted is 70 feet. Mt Ararat is about 16,000 feet high. 

65 meters, for both Greenland and Antarctic ice.  Around 210 feet.

https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/Sea level.pdf

 

Sure, the topic is silly, but let's not confuse metric and English systems of measure.  

 

[Genady]

It is ridiculous to refute this story using laws of nature. This event was by definition not natural.

P.S. I am an atheist.

[Sensei]

4 hours ago, studiot said:

It also include birds; don't know if you include them in animals ?

What did they eat during the trip and right after landing.. ?

Two lions and two antelopes sit side by side. And lions waiting months for these antelopes to reproduce before they can be hunted.. Right.

Every farmer, even an ancient one, knows that from one hen and one rooster a flock will not be made, because the young males and young females would have to have sex with their mother and father..

Edited Saturday at 06:46 PM by Sensei

[studiot]

2 hours ago, exchemist said:

Yes, if we want to get some science into this thread,

I agree, we are supposed to be discussing scientific aspects of religion.

Archaeology is a science as is geological history.

 

Just now, LuckyR said:

This entire topic is ridiculous on it's face. The total possible sea rise if all ice on Earth melted is 70 feet. Mt Ararat is about 16,000 feet high. 

Leonard Woolley set out to find such evidence in Mesopotamia and found both archaeological and geological evidence of a great flood about 6000 years ago.

 

Geologists have found plenty of evidence of a great flood in North Americal 13000 to 15000 years ago when Lake Missoula burst the ice dam.