CREATIONISM DEBUNKED ARK! ARK!
WHAT A LARK!
December 1995 GM Humanist
I have long been surprised at how little of our humanistic literature
actually deals with theological investigation. I have occasionally looked at
important biblical stories with a question or two in mind. The Noah's Ark story
is one that many creationists take very literally indeed. It goes like this:
One upon a time, people became too wicked, and the all-loving God decided to
teach them a lesson. He would kill them all, and start again. This second
beginning meant that someone had to survive, and the lucky man was called Noah.
God thought Noah was righteous, but we never find out why.
God spoke to Noah, and told him to build a big boat, the Ark, out of gopher
wood, three stories high with a single door and a single window. The crew of
the Ark was to be small, consisting of Noah, his wife, three sons (Shem, Ham
& Japeth) and their respective wives - eight people all told. The rest of the
boat has to serve as a vast floating zoo for two of each animal on the planet,
one male, one female. Noah was also to take along enough food for every animal
and human on board. Noah was to work quickly, because God was going to make it
rain and rain and rain until the world was completely drowned. The only
survivors would be the crew of the ark and their new pets.
Noah, aged a mere 600 years old, completed his Ark of gopher wood and
rounded up the animals, two by two, as instructed (or ordered?) by God. He even
took on the additional burden of finding seven of every male, and seven of
every female clean beast.
The rains came, and the animals, and crew floated around on the flood tide
for forty days and forty nights. Even after it stopped raining the water stayed
on the earth for 150 days. The Ark finally settled on top of Mount Ararat. Noah
let the animals out and they all, beasts and humans alike, went off to multiply
happily ever after.
God put a rainbow in the sky to show that he would never cause such a However
the Ark must have been very flood again, because next time he big indeed. Some
people say that it wants to kill us all, he's going to burn us to death
instead.
Many creationists believe in the flood story. People have searched on the
slopes of Mount Ararat in Armenia
for traces of the Ark itself, and some even claim to have found it. Could
the flood story therefore really have happened as described in The Bible?
God is rather fond of changing his mind isn’t he? Adam and Eve were told
that they would die horribly if they ate the fruit of the Tree Of Knowledge Of
Good & Evil, but they were merely ejected from Eden. Then God decides to
wipe out all the people and all the otherwise innocent animals and plants too,
save those chosen by Noah for the survival programme. This is the behaviour of
a sociopathic serial killer.
Gopher wood always struck me as a joke: Come, Noah, go for wood, gopher more
wood, gopher nails. The Ark had to be immense to fit so many animals on board,
so why just the one door and window? The smell must have been appalling and
most animals if not all the people on board would have died from lack of
ventilation.
The precise dimensions of the Ark are lost to us, as the measurements are
given in cubits. The cubit is a measurement not unlike the measurement unit
known as hands among horse-breeders, and often varied from town to town,, and
village to village. However, the Ark must have been very big indeed. Some
commentators say it must have been at least 450 feet which is much smaller than
many cargo and passenger ships currently afloat. The average city zoo would be
hard pressed to fit its entire menagerie alive on board the biggest ships
afloat today, the oil tankers where the crew use motor bikes to get about.
Consider the difficulties of keeping certain creatures apart, of allowing
room for movement; consider the effect of rising sea levels or freshwater life.
Nothing is said of the flora for that matter; many plants would have bee
wiped out by the rising waters and not all seeds would have been carried
through the storm to repopulate the desert globe.
Some pictures of the event have the animals coming voluntarily to the Ark
but the bible says Noah was to fetch them. So how did Noah catch the animals,
especially in places like Australia and South America? Some Creationists might
say that the flood waters carried the Ark around to the countries that had not
yet seen too much rain but Genesis days that all the animals were happily on
board before the rain came. One theory I have come across is based on the line
Genesis I:9 about the waters being gathered in one place and the land being
gathered in a separate place. Coupling this with modern theories of continental
drift Creationists believe all the continents to have been united, and separated
only by some cataclysm like the Flood. However, the Flood story says nothing of
the waters driving the continents apart in such a way. Nor does it explain how
Noah was able to send the kangaroos and platypuses home to Oz afterwards. If
the continent divided in some later catastrophe you would think someone would
remembered it. No doubt some humans were able to reach islands and land-masses
causeways and glacial ice which later crumbled through earthquake, etc., but
most drifting had occurred long humans ever evolved.
The flood itself is one of the Bible’s most spectacular events. The waters
level rose just because of rain, but also through the opening of underground
and undersea springs to release the waters contained in the Earth. The flood
waters would have risen at the rate of 725 feet a day for forty days until the
whole planet was covered beyond the of a peak of Everest. Most land creatures
would have been wiped out in the first the few days.
The human crew of the Ark must have terribly been busy feeding a million
highly ~ specialised diets to the various animals, or was it all porridge, like
it or lump it? The average zoo could not possibly cope using a staff of eight,
if even if the public were not allowed to visit. This zoological and
veterinarian work was on top of crewing the Ark through the worst storm in
human history (Whoops, did I say history?), and cleaning up after seasick
animals. This was no pleasure cruise: Such good surfing waves and no time to
enjoy it!
The storm over, there were still a a hundred and ten days of floating around
to go. Finally. the Ark strikes dry land at Mount Ararat, and the animals would
appear to have been left to find their new homes without help from Noah, as
everyone gets down to some serious multiplying, not to mention the long and
difficult homeward travels faced by some.
The Ark then disappeared from view until discovered by a Creationist
"archaeologist" .
Every race of humans has ~ experienced a flood at some time. Early human
communities had to settle within twenty walking miles of a source of fresh
drinking water that wouldn't dry up, so major river valleys such as the Nile,
Indus, Ganges or Jordan were idea. Inevitably, such rivers flood from time to
time, so that it is no surprise that early cultures all have legends associated
with great floods. Perhaps the melting of the glaciers of the last ice-age even
caused from time to time a sudden, global rise in sea
level. The flood stories found in the religions of many peoples may well
share a common origin in a particularly memorable and disastrous flood. There
would, however, have been no chance of any single flood having killed all but a
single boat load he of animals.
The Genesis myth would seem to have been drawn from that of the
Mesopotamians who have a similar story with an Ark and a terrible flood in the
Gilgamesh saga.
Why do Creationists maintain a belief that there really was a flood, an ark
and a Noah? What difference would it make to the Bible narrative as a whole if
it passed straight from Cain and Abel to Abraham and family?
Creationists, fundamentalists and many other believers feel that if we
undermine any part of the Bible, then we might as well discard the lot, as it
would no longer serve as the infallible Word of God.
The Flood story serves as part of the defence case against the dreaded a
Charles Darwin, and a variety of palaeontologists, geologists and other
scientists. These scientific types claim that the evidence in the ground at our
feet shows that the world was never made in six days, but developed over at
least four and half billion years with nary a designer or architect in sight,
and for most of that period, people and animals were nowhere in sight.
Scientists say that any time traveller setting co-ordinates for a meeting with
Adam on the sixth day of the planet's history would be frazzled to oblivion
like a spit on a griddle in the molten lava that was the still-cooling surface
. of the planet.
The same scientists say that before humans and other mammals became
dominant, the world was inhabited by reptiles called dinosaurs, some very
large, who died off before they got to meet us and eat us. They keep on finding
bits of bone and even eggs belonging to these creatures. The Creationists are very
embarrassed by this. If these creatures were for real, why did they die off?
Why didn't Noah round up a pair of diplodocuses or pterodactyls? The fact is
that dinosaur bones prove that Noah's Ark is a myth. Creationists try a number
of arguments to discredit anyone making this formidable factual assertion. Some
say in all seriousness that the dinosaur bones were planted by God in the
fossil record to test the faith of the faithful. Those of us who prefer to
believe that the dinosaurs were real, and that Noah wasn't, have failed the
corpse test, and we will therefore burn in Hell.
The idea that an open, honest and loving God could test the faith of the
masses by making bones that look as though they are millions of years older
than they really are is utterly bizarre. What he is doing is creating evidence
for his own non-existence and then asking his chosen people to deny the
evidence of their own eyes and say that he really exists anyway. The argument
expects a considerable leap of faith and an acceptance of the blatantly
ludicrous.
Some Creationists say that the dinosaur bones are an elaborate
conspiratorial hoax perpetrated by palaeontologists who are apparently able to
plant man made dinosaur bones under veritable mountains and find them again
later....
One Creationist cited the famous Piltdown Man hoax to me as proof of this
conspiracy. Because this fossil consisted of an orang-utan jawbone attached to
a human skull of no great age, it was alleged that all fossil finds are similar
hoaxes. One might On just as well say that because the Turin Shroud was proved
a fake, therefore Jesus, ipso facto, did not exist either. The Piltdown hoax
was perpetrated on scientists, and it was scientists who proved it a hoax, not
Creationists.
Another explanation for fossil remains put forward by Creationists is that
the flood waters threw around the corpses of the drowned animals and pressed
them into the earth as they so settled, distorting the bone shapes and
compositions. Another non-starter, since flood water throws things about
randomly, whereas the layered deposits discovered by many fossil hunters and
geologists demonstrate a periodic dying-out of creatures through geological
time.
Creationists have a limited range of responses to such damming evidence.
They may say "Lies, lies, lies, damn you all to Hell." Or they may
say, "Very well, let's drop Noah's Ark." But wait: if Noah goes, then
the word of God is flawed, written by men, or least that bit is. So what about
the other bits of Genesis, and the Bible as a whole?
On 17 September 1992 the Guardian reported that an Australian called
Adam Newman completed his fourth Ark in a twenty-eight-year history of
boat-building. One of these arks is his own house, watertight and at least
apparently seaworthy. He has been making them since God told him he should. He
has only a cat, a few pigeons and several rats on board. Perhaps Adam Newman
knows something we don't.
Arthur Chappell Readers may like to read more about the complexities of Genesis. Try In the Beginning by the late Isaac Asimov, New English, Library, 1981, or The Unauthorised Version by Robin Lane Fox, Penguin 1992
Arthur Chappell
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