How long was noah afloat

Since it runs counter to all the known facts of genetics and taxonomy, the burden of proof is upon the creationists to verify it. Where are the fossil baramins? What findings show that such ideal creatures ever existed? If complete sets of kind alleles could survive twenty-four hundred or more years of radiation before the flood, it should be possible to find specimens today with inexplicably large chromosomal complements, perhaps in undiversified families.

Unfortunately for "baramin geneticists," studies have been done on such families cf. Loughman, Frye, and Herald , and nothing extraordinary has been discovered. Still no experiments are forthcoming from the ICR to test its hypothesis. It is, in fact, "armchair science" without a shred of evidence, and we are justified in rejecting it entirely and assuming that "two of every sort" means two of every species.

Another foil used to lighten the ark is the assertion that many, in fact most, species could have survived outside the ark and, eo ipso, did. Creationists somehow do not mind that this gambit is contradicted by Scripture Genesis , So, starting with fish and marine invertebrates, the list is expanded to include aquatic mammals, amphibians, most other invertebrates, sea birds, and "land animals that could not have survived otherwise" LaHaye and Morris, p.

Morris's spectacle of dinosaurs "somehow surviving outside" , p. Whitcomb and Morris, pp. From this it is but a short step to the ancient Eastern legend that the giant Og of Bashan survived by wading after the ark!

But can the great ship be so easily emptied? We can dismiss the waterlogged Stegosaurus splashing about for days as an idea as absurd as Og of Bashan's big swim; amphibians and other animals that need some terra firma can be passed by as well. Let's go directly to those creatures that spend all of their lives in the water.

Although creationists seem to think that once you're wet it's all the same, there are actually many aquatic regimes and many specialized inhabitants in each. Some fish live only in cold, clear mountain lakes; others in brackish swamps. Some depend on splashing, rocky, oxygen-rich creeks, while others, such as a freshwater dolphin, a manatee, and a thirteen-foot catfish, live only in the sluggish Amazon. In all these instances plus many more, the environment provided by the deluge waters would have no more suited these creatures than it would have the desert tortoise or the polar bear.

The salinity of the oceans would have been substantially affected by the flood; Whitcomb and Morris lamely address this concern by noting that some saltwater fish can survive in freshwater and vice versa and that "some individuals of each kind would be able to survive the gradual mixing of the waters and gradual change in salinities during and after the flood" p.

We are asked to believe that a storm so vast that the tops of the mountains were covered in forty days was so "gradual" that fish could adapt to these minor fluctuations!

In reality, although some species can inhabit both fresh and saline waters, most freshwater fish dropped in saltwater shrivel and die, while saltwater fish dropped in freshwater bloat and die. Creationist E. Norbert Smith theorizes that the denser saltwater would not have mixed with the flood's freshwater and thus both varieties of fish could have made it through.

But his own experiment, in which a goldfish thoroughly mingled the two types of water in a fishbowl in fifteen days, shows how long the separation would last during the violent shiftings of the earth called for in the creationist flood model.

Arguing over salinity is, however, a moot point, for the environmental hazards of the flood had to be so great that the salt content would be a fish's least concern. We must remember that, according to creationists, the deluge, in one year's time, deposited nearly all of the sedimentary rocks present in the world today.

To get some idea of how muddy this would be, we should note that creationist flood theorists maintain that the original ocean basins were greatly enlarged to their present depths to receive the retreating flood waters Whitcomb, , pp. This volume is 1,x 10 6 cubic kilometers. The volume of Phanerozoic sedimentary rock "flood deposits" is x 10 6 cubic kilometers Blatt, Middleton, and Murray, p.

The ratio of water to rock is thus 2. Try mixing two parts water to one part sand; double or even triple the amount of the water, and then stick your pet goldfish into the muck and see how long it lives! Then, too, most of the world's volcanic activity, sea-floor spreading, mountain-building, and continent-splitting was supposed to have occurred at this time as well, filling the seas with additional huge volumes of rock, ash, and noxious gases.

Undersea volcanoes usually decimate all life in the surrounding area Buljan , and their extent had to be global during this terrible year. The earth's prediluvian surface would thus have been scoured clean, and forests, multi-ton boulders, and the debris of civilization hurtled about like missiles.

Finally, this tremendous explosion of energy would have transformed the seas into a boiling cauldron in which no life could possibly survive. Accurate calculations are nearly impossible, given the creationist penchant for vagueness; but by multiplying the amount of heat generated during a typical volcanic eruption cf.

Macdonald, p. Obviously, nearly any concessions, any margins of error, can be granted to the creationists within their geological framework and the flood water would remain a churning, boiling inferno, easily accomplishing God's intention of destroying the world. Yet amidst all of this, creationist icthyologists aver that life went on as usual, with a few minor adjustments to the "gradual" changes. The salmon swam to their long-vanished riparian breeding grounds that fall as they always had; sea anemones clung to their rocky perches, which were on the beach one month and the abyssal plain the next; blue whales continued to strain for krill even though their baleen plates were choked with mud; corals, which grow in clear, shallow water, somehow grew anyway; hapless bottom dwellers, their lives carefully adjusted to certain conditions of pressure and temperature, suddenly saw the former increase by more than 5, pounds per square inch and the latter fluctuate in who knows what directions.

Backhaus tells us that "aquatic species would pay for any attempts at acclimatization with their lives or, at any rate, would not survive for very long" p.

Most are highly sensitive to changes in salinity, temperature, light, oxygen, and even trace elements cf. Bond; Hill. The conclusion is unavoidable: barring a special miracle from God, nothing but the hardiest microorganism could have survived the flood outside the ark.

Of course, the omnipotent deity could have performed several million individual miracles and preserved representatives of the invertebrates, fishes, amphibians, and even dinosaurs outside the ark; but, if so, why not extend the coverage to the few remaining terrestrial vertebrates and dispense with the boat altogether?

Again, by some freak combination of luck, we may imagine one male and one female octopus surviving the disaster and somehow encountering each other between Japan and California to renew their species, but the only way Noah, as designated curator of the world zoo, could have guaranteed their persistence was by bringing them aboard. We must conclude, therefore, that every species of the animal kingdom had at least two members within the ark.

So now we are back to fitting all the animals on board. Yet creationists still have another method of saving space. They postulate that many full grown adult animal forms were left behind and that only young and thus smaller specimens were taken or—the ultimate economy—that eggs were sufficient for the preservation of the dinosaurs John Morris, , p.

Most zoologists, however, would agree with Neill when he writes that "the mortality rate is usually very high among seedling plants and young animals; but once the critical juvenile stage is passed, the organism has a good chance of reaching old age" p. In birds, for example, as many as 80 percent die before reaching maturity Dathe —facing everyday hazards. Furthermore, the young of many species cannot survive without parental care and feeding imagine two tiny unweaned kittens shivering in their stalls!

The luckless animals aboard the ark were confronting the gravest challenge to their endurance ever known, and they needed to be the strongest, healthiest, and most virile representatives their species had ever produced; juveniles would not do.

As for the dinosaur eggs, how did Noah know whether one would yield a female, the other a male—or even that both were fertile? And since no eggs require a year's gestation, he soon would have had a hoard of fragile hatchlings on his hands. Noah's responsibilities did not end with animals, for without plants all life would perish.

Whitcomb and Morris grant that many seeds were aboard the ark in the food stores p. George Howe, too, referring to an experiment where three of five species showed germination after twenty weeks of soaking in sea water, concluded that the survival rate through dormancy would have been high December However, two of these three sprouted only when their seed coats were scarified cut.

This presents a special problem. The abrasive force of the deluge would have easily scarified the seed coats, but this would have been too soon.

The seeds would have sprouted under water and died. But after the flood waters receded and the seeds were exposed to dry land, what would guarantee their being scarified then? Howe's experiments failed to properly duplicate the conditions required by the flood model and hence his work offers no support for seed survival during the deluge.

In reality, seed dormancy is a complex affair and involves metabolic and environmental prerequisites for entrance into and recovery from the state as well as several forms of quiescence.

The vast majority of seeds which become dormant do so in order to endure cold temperatures or prolonged drought, and in the warm flood waters most would germinate immediately and then drown for lack of oxygen cf. The waters weren't the only thing that would bury them, however, for huge deposits of silt and lava would have been laid down as well, entombing entire forests and paving the way for coal and oil formation. Today the surface of the ground consists of 80 percent Phanerozoic rock and only 20 percent Precambrian "pre-diluvian" , the latter found mostly in large shields and entirely absent in many areas Kummel, p.

These shields themselves would have been eroded to the bedrock by the flooding "the vegetation would have been uprooted. Floating is also unsatisfactory as a means of riding out the storm. Less than 1 percent of sermatophytes produce disseminules which drift for as long as one month, much less a year Gunn and Dennis, p. And although many debris rafts could have been torn loose during the early days of the storm, such vessels tend to break up in rough water Zimmerman, p.

If somehow a few of them did, how would they know where to unload their precious cargo afterward? Suppose, for example, that a hefty chunk was torn loose from a densely grown forest and managed to swing through a sparse desert area, where such rafts presumably wouldn't form, to pick up seeds from a few rare cacti. After a year at sea, what is the likelihood that these seeds would be dropped in an area where the temperature, rainfall, soil, and light would be suitable for their growth?

As the retreating waters evaporated, the topsoil would become saturated with salts much like the beds of dry lakes in arid regions, and all but the hardiest halophilic plants would find the ground too toxic for any growth. Seawater contains thirty-five grams of salts per liter, and most plants cannot tolerate one-tenth this concentration Levitt, p.

Finally, assuming that some seeds did reach a survivable spot, how long would their flowers have to wait before the birds and insects arrived from Ararat to cross-pollinate them? Could the many species indigenous to the New World hold on while the transatlantic trip was made? Isaac Asimov observes that the ancient Hebrews did not regard plants as alive in the same sense animals are p.

Today's fundamentalists should have learned some botany since then, but they still carry on about the "hardiness" of olives Whitcomb and Morris, p. If we are to take the deluge seriously, we must be much more skeptical about such stories. The creationists need to soak seeds in very deep, muddy water for a year and then plant them in unconsolidated, briny silt in an unfavorable climate without insect or avian pollinators to see what happens. Have their mathematicians, so skilled at calculating improbabilities for protein formation, ever determined the odds of a seed enduring the flood and then landing in the right soil and climate rather than being swept out to sea by the retreating waters or coming down in Antarctica?

It seems that Noah needed to have not merely "many" seeds but many samples of all the seeds and spores of the ,plus species of plants in order to guarantee their survival—or else we must tally up a few million more miracles of divine preservation. We can finally begin to make some calculations.

Robert D. Barnes lists the number of living species for each phylum, ranging from the sole member of Placozoa to the , in Arthropoda pp. Using his figures, we arrive at a total of 1,, species. In addition, there are many animals that are as yet unknown. Wendt estimates that only 2 percent of all the parasitic worms are known, which would easily add another million species p. This includes as many as , nematodes, although only 15, have been described Levine, p.

Ten thousand new species of insects are discovered every year, yet still only a small fraction of those in existence have been found Atkins, p. All of those creatures were known at one time, for Adam gave them all names Genesis , and, since they exist today, they must have been on the ark. But we shall be extremely generous to the creationists and add only , undiscovered species to our figure of 1,,—thus giving a mere 1,, species with which Noah had to contend. To this number, we must add the myriad of extinct prehistoric animals, which creationists assure us were alive at the time of the flood, making tracks in the Paluxy River, and which were known to Job afterward John Morris, , p.

This would vastly increase the numbers, since "only a tiny percentage of the animal and plant species that have ever existed are alive today" Kear, p. However, since creationists do not believe in transitional forms, we can again give them the benefit of the doubt and add to our total only the , different fossils that have been described.

This brings the number to 1,, species or animal pairs that were to be boarded onto the ark. Of course, we can't forget that Genesis particularly in the Revised Standard Version makes it clear that only unclean animals come in single pairs, male and female; the clean animals and birds come in seven pairs, male and female.

That means fourteen of each clean animal and each bird. But since figures for the number of clean animals are hard to find, we will have to let creationists off the hook and ignore them. Birds are another story.

There are 8, species of birds. Since they have already been calculated into our figure of 1,, species or 3,, individual animals on the ark, we need only six more pairs of each species of bird to make it come out to seven pairs. That brings our count up to a grand total of 3,, animals aboard the ark—two of each species, except birds which number fourteen each.

This figure may seem excessive at first glance, but in reality it is so small as to be unrealistic. Many animals need more than a single pair to reproduce. Bees and other hymenopterans live in colonies and "apart from the community [they] cannot properly function or survive" Lindauer, p. Many types of flies engage in reproductive swarming. Some birds will not mate unless they are part of a flock Conway, p. In fact, "animals which unite into colonies for purposes of reproduction are by no means rare phenomena" Wendt, p.

The whole process of mating, egg-laying, gestation, and the survival of the fragile young is a risky business that can easily be aborted by many factors, including predators, disease, exposure to the elements, and so on. In many species of spiders, given the chance the female will kill and devour the male before they mate; on the ark, the hapless husband would have to be particularly fleetfooted or his wife would unwittingly exterminate her species!

Infanticide is another significant concern and occurs frequently even among primates. Dayflies, so named because their mature stage lasts only a few hours, form a tiny cloud of dancing males trying to attract females, with a successful mating rate of at most 1 percent Wendt, p. Even the prodigious rabbits fare poorly outside many-chambered warrens, the work of numerous individuals Andrewartha, p.

Locating one's mate can also be tricky. The Sumatran rhino depends on communication points in its range, and, if it can't visit these, it loses contact with others and reproduction doesn't occur Lang. The tick, Ixodes ricinus, mates only on a sheep which must browse through a field and by chance pick up both a male and a female tick—and even then these poor crawlers can't find one another if they are too far apart on the sheep's body Andrewartha, p.

Imagine the microscopic parasites of a bull elephant, limited to two per species by Sacred Writ, searching for each other on the vast cosmos of their host's body! Competitive social behavior between males is often necessary to achieve successful androgen levels Kleiman, p. Individual incompatibility between a pair of animals is another commonplace, often thwarting the most determined zoo keepers' efforts at breeding.

All told, with but a single male and female apiece, or even seven pairs of birds and clean animals, every species on earth would be well below the margin of endangerment, and the chances of successful survival, especially in the devastation of the post-diluvian world, would be so small that they can be considered nil. Conservation biologists estimate a minimum size of fifty for a species's survival, with or more being a more realistic figure Franklin.

Hence our grand total could be multiplied many times and still represent only the most tenuous hold of life on earth. Was there room enough on the ark?

Part of this was occupied by the quarters for Noah and his family. Room had to be provided for the orderly compartmentalization of plants and seeds.

An immense storage area for food, fresh water, and waste was needed. Also, the ark had to have corridors throughout, large enough for the passage of the bulkiest animals to their stalls when boarding and unboarding and at least large enough for the crew to pass into the most remote corners of the vessel. There would finally be a considerable volume lost in wood alone; the decks, larger cages, supporting beams, and so on would occupy a considerable space.

The six-masted schooners had keelsons 7 feet high and 8 feet wide running the full length of the hull and often used 20 x 20 inch beams Snow ; the switch to iron construction increased cargo capacity by upwards of 20 percent cf. Hutchins, p. If we conservatively allow all of these requirements to consume 30 percent of the space, this leaves 1,, cubic feet to be divided among the nearly 4 million animals, resulting in a mere 0.

No arrangement of cages, however ingenious, no high-density packing of minute invertebrates, could squeeze everyone into this amount of room. For comparison, a sable antelope or red hartebeest needs a crate of 57 cubic feet for the brief journey from capture to quarantine; a zebra, 77 cubic feet; medium-sized giraffe, 99; eland, ; hippopotamus or small elephant, adapted from Hirst, p.

These seven species alone, male and female, require more than 5, times the allotment per specimen for a trip that rarely exceeds three days. For the days of the flood, the area would need to be greatly enlarged—for crowding and lack of exercise would be extremely detrimental, if not fatal, to most cf.

Young, p. Many birds must have high roofs with room to fly, and even a pond snail needs a gallon of water for adequate living Orlans, p. Probably the greatest space requirements are involved in keeping aquatic organisms. Many fish swim continually, even when sleeping, and the general rule is gallons of water per pound of animal weight Atz, p. Gruber and Keyes state that "the primary cause of mortality in captive pelagic sharks is that their living space is not large enough" p.

Marineland of the Pacific has an 80 x 22 foot circular whale stadium of , gallons, containing four small whales and some dolphins; the many large whales would occupy aquaria "the size of a football stadium" Hill, p. All of this would have constituted a tremendous weight. Filby would put a mere hundred tons of animals aboard, with a few thousand tons of supplies cited by Montgomery, p. However, a mature sheep the creationists' average-sized animal weighs pounds, and at this rate the vertebrates alone would exceed 4, tons.

When the huge volume of food and drinking water, the hundreds of thousands of gallons in the aquaria, and the giant dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals are included, it is clear that the ark would have sunk like a brick the moment it was launched. At this stage, further discussion of the overcrowding becomes rather pointless. We leave the conundrum in the laps of the creationists, recalling the words of theologian Johannes Weiss, "The apologists.

Perhaps God performed a miraculous miniaturization on the animals; as the flood legend takes on more and more of an Alice-in-Wonderland air, anything becomes possible. Before moving on, we must briefly take note of an argument so popular that nearly every ark theorist uses it: that the interior of the ark could have held literally hundreds of standard-sized railroad stock cars and thus was quite roomy.

But while the figures for rail car size and capacity are cited with fair accuracy, ignored is the federal law which requires a train on a long haul to stop every twenty-eight hours, to unload the stock, to feed and water them, and to give them a five-hour rest period Ensminger, p. This may be just a minor inconvenience to American ranchers, but it would have been quite impossible for Noah. Thus the analogy collapses. The fact that every creationist has triumphantly trotted out his train statistics, yet overlooked this decisive flaw, demonstrates once again the sloppiness of creationists' research.

Having drawn up a passenger list, the next order of business is to gather them all at dockside. At this point, the creationists themselves are unable to propound any sort of scenario in which Noah and his sons could perform such a feat, so they resort to the convenient dumping ground of the inexplicable: miracles. God himself intervened by implanting in the chosen pair from each species the instinct of migration, and by this mechanism they gathered from the four corners of the world and headed for the Plains of Shinar Whitcomb, p.

LaHaye and Morris p. That this is not too farfetched we can see today, say creationists, for many animals still migrate, and this is the most "scientific" explanation available for their ability to do so. A closer look reveals that a miracle is indeed called for in the gathering of the animals, but it is a much larger and more complex one than merely imparting "premonition" and migration.

In the first place, a glance at Jarman's Atlas of Animal Migration shows that of all the birds, fish, and terrestrial animals whose paths are shown, only one, the common crane of southern Russia, currently migrates to the Mesopotamian Valley. Therefore, God not only programmed the animals to go to Noah's place before the flood, but afterward he deprogrammed most of them and rerouted all the rest except the common crane—a reverse miracle.

Incidentally, it is noteworthy that many aquatic creatures migrate, a faculty whose origins the creationists find incomprehensible unless these creatures were also sent to the ark.

However accurate their suddenly acquired instinct, for many animals it could not have been enough to overcome the geographical barriers between them and the ark. The endemic fauna of the New World, Australia, and other remote regions, as well as animals unable to survive the Near Eastern environment, would find the journey too difficult no matter how desperately they yearned to go.

Flood theorists are unperturbed by such obstacles, however, for they simply gerrymander the map to give us an antediluvian world of undivided continents and a uniform, semitropical, spring-like climate, and —presto! But this resolves one question only to raise another: in such a world, where did the animals which are found today in the arctic, desert, alpine, and other specialized postdiluvian niches live?

The polar bear, caribou, walrus, yak, snow leopard, and many more would suffocate in the warm tropics; many desert dwellers could not have endured the excessive humidities they would have encountered. Creationists would no doubt respond that these creatures evolved within their "kinds" after the flood, but we have already found that concept so vague as to be meaningless.

Besides, since in their chronology the ice age immediately followed the deluge and started freezing woolly mammoths, the rapidity of intrakind evolution would be far greater than any Darwinist ever dreamed possible and there could be no logical justification for continuing to rage against interkind transformation. On the other hand, there may have been a small desert here, a tiny tundra there, to house these specimens for the few centuries from the creation to the time their regular habitats appeared, but that puts us back on square one wondering how they struggled through the heat and humidity to the ark.

Other creatures had it even rougher. Hundreds of species live only in caves and are so sensitive that many cannot survive in caverns just slightly different from their own and many may be killed by exposure to light Vandel, pp. For these cavernicoles, even a very short journey from their homes would prove impossible. Could Noah have fetched them himself to save them from a fatal march? Could he have distinguished the species of pseudoscorpions and picked out a male and female of each?

Aquatic animals would also find the trip challenging. Did all the representatives of the oceans, lakes, and streams overcome their sensitivities to normally lethal changes in environmental conditions and swim up the ancient Euphrates or the "mighty Hiddekel" to the docks nearest the ark? How did the many sessile species, from sponges and corals to anemones and barnacles, detach themselves and waddle through however brief a trip it may have been?

A problem analogous to that of terrestrial arctic and desert dwellers would be the exotic inhabitants of the abyssal and hadal zones of the ocean depths. In this instance, too, creationists have postulated only shallow seas before the deluge, precluding the very existence of deep-sea dwellers. In reply, we again insist either that such accelerated evolution occurred that creationists have argued themselves out of a job or else that there was a trench somewhere in the "shallow seas" specifically for these organisms.

Some important complications arise with that extensive group of organisms known as parasites. Hundreds of thousands of species are known, and a very large proportion of them are host specific and must spend all or part of their lives within the host animal. Therefore the single pair of animals from each species had to carry aboard the ark the parasites that were adapted to living within or upon them.

Although many of these are harmless freeloaders, others are pathogenic and often fatal to their host. Yet the fact that such organisms exist today demonstrates that they survived the flood, and the fact that they must inhabit their host shows how they survived. The example of Homo sapiens will show the seriousness of the problem. Humans are sanctuary to over one hundred parasites, and many are host specific. Although the four species of human malarial parasites undergo sexual development in mosquitos, they must undergo further development in humans.

Hence, a member of Noah's family must have had malaria at some point in his life and must have remained infected after the flood until the earth became sufficiently repopulated that the parasite passed to others. In similar manners, the vectors of many other parasitic infections are also specific to humans, such as the tapeworms Taenia saginata and T. Also, of course, the five types of venereal disease bacteria cannot survive outside their human abode.

These eight unfortunate souls were afflicted with enough diseases and discomforts to support a hospital—all as their part in "preserving life" through the great flood.

And nearly every other animal on board—from Shem's lice to the right whales—had parasites of their own to cope with. What remarkable creatures they must have been; in order to ensure their survival they ha, d to be the strongest, healthiest, most fertile pair possible, while at the same time they had to carry a full set of debilitating parasites so as to guarante, , e their survival. How was Noah assured that the proper complement of viable tapeworms was present in each rodent and each lizard waiting to come aboard?

How could he confirm the presence of microscopic fauna in their tiny stalls? If a prospective passenger was lacking an essential flea, what could be done?

Was there opportunity to correct any errors? If just one of the teeming hoard of animals turned out to be sterile, that species would become extinct. Could Noah verify everyone's fertility? For that matter, could he even verify that the couple on the gangplank were male and female, when a great many animals, including 30 percent of the birds and even some mammals, are sexually monomorphic and cannot be distinguished without modern veterinary techniques or even hormonal analysis?

Most fish are indeterminant as juveniles and will only become male or female when mature Bond, pp. No wonder Segraves proposes a miracle here p. Creationists insist on a strictly literal interpretation of Genesis; so when those animals which reproduce by asexual budding, or the over one thousand thelytokous all-female species from insects to lizards, converged toward the ark, another special miracle would have been called for to fulfill the explicit command to take both male and female aboard.

By the time Noah encountered the sea star, Asterina gibbosa, which begins life as a male and eventually becomes female, he must have been ready to throw in the towel in frustration. The journey of the animals presents other remarkable facets. They traveled over hill, over dale, through the dense jungles, and across the mighty Edenic rivers without a single accident.

No limbs were broken, no drownings occurred. Amazingly, not one perished at the paws of a predator; from the tastiest earthworm to the freshest frog, all marched past the hungry inhabitants of the forest with impunity. Orr stresses that "migration is hazardous. For species that engage in long migrations it may be a great strain on the bodies of the participants. There may be extended periods without food as well as long hours of travel.

Attrition through predation may be higher during migration" p. He also notes that getting lost can be a problem, especially for those traveling singly as opposed to flocks and herds pp. But if the divine instinct often fails today's travelers, what chance did such unlikely wayfarers as eyeless cave fish, giant sloths, and sea urchins have of locating a specific acre in Asia?

Christopher was clearly in his finest hour, performing literally thousands of miracles every day. Perhaps with a vivid imagination we can picture this divine Pied Piper saga in action; but no such excuse can save Noah from his responsibility for gathering the seeds of the nearly half million plants that survived the flood.

No premonition, however urgent, could cause a pine cone to commence rolling toward the ark; someone would have to go get it. Our biblical botanists would have to be able to identify fertile seeds and spores, find them at the proper season, and make sure that the storage area aboard ship would be suitable.

In the damp depths of the ark, most seeds would either rot or sprout and then die for lack of nutrients and light. How did Noah prepare and maintain the special low-humidity containers necessary to ensure their dormancy?

How did he control insects, rodents, and fungi? Seed storage is a complex technology and, without proper techniques, "no seed can maintain its viability for long" Thomson, p. In addition, God told Noah to gather food for the various animals Genesis , many of whom, as we shall see, have highly specialized diets.

Hence, even if the animals could reach the ark unaided, an overwhelming burden would be placed upon our heroes with regard to the plant kingdom. At last this remarkable menagerie gathered before the gaping door of the great ship.

Still the protective aura hovered over them, for natural enemies stood side by side without conflict: the mighty carnivores ignored countless opportunities to fill their stomachs; the panicky impulses of animals in strange surroundings were subdued; even the centipedes and beetles escaped extinction from the chance misstep of the elephant.

This surreal tranquility extended to animals that were not among the elect—for the sounds and smells of the teeming throng undoubtedly piqued the interest of the denizens of the surrounding jungle, yet none of them took advantage of having a meal spread out before them on a silver platter.

The peaceful scene was about to come to an abrupt end, however. All at once the command went forth to board the ark, and pandemonium erupted. The Bible emphasizes that all the animals and human passengers entered the ark on the same day Genesis Simple division of our grand total shows that Even if we grant that the parasites could hitch a ride with their hosts and many insects could go through at once, and if we simply count the vertebrates including the seven pairs of birds , this still averages out to two per second.

This was not merely a mad scramble for the door but involved weaving through the intricate maze of corridors until the correct cage—that one specific stall exactly designed to meet that animal's needs—was located, entered, and secured.

It includes Noah's unenviable task of getting clams and piranhas, barely visible mites, and killer whales, into their quarters. The new evidence is of a sudden flood about 7, years ago. Many geologists are wary of the revised theory and feel conflict about trying to prove an event from an ancient text. It is also noted that the Bible records Noah as living in a Mesopotamian desert, whereas the Black Sea coastline was then lush and forested.

Nevertheless, continuing geological expeditions to the Black Sea attract widespread public interest because of the Noah connection. And widespread interest is an essential lubricant to facilitate the flow of money to support expensive geological expeditions.

Noah was years old when the flood came on the earth on the 17th day of the second month. He and his wife and his sons and their wives went into the boat to escape the flood. A male and a female of every kind of animal and bird went into the boat as God had commanded. All the outlets of the vast body of water beneath the earth burst open, all the floodgates of the sky were opened and rain fell on the earth for 40 days and nights. The water became so deep it covered the highest mountains.

Every living being on the earth died except Noah and the others on the boat. The rain stopped and the water gradually went down for days and the boat came to rest on a mountain on the Ararat range. When Noah was years old, on the 1st day of the 1st month the water was gone. William Reville, is associate professor of biochemistry and director of microscopy at University College, Cork.

Please update your payment details to keep enjoying your Irish Times subscription. Noah's Ark myth has evidence of great flood Thu, Oct 23, , The righteous Noah and his family and two of every kind of animal survived by floating in a great ark, writes Professor William Reville Many other cultures also have stories of an ancient flood that left only a few survivors - the Babylonians, ancient Greeks and Romans, and Native Americans.

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