In his post, "Ark Dimentions", Ray attempts to lay out the case (via a letter from Richard Gunther) that Noah's Ark was designed perfectly for its purpose, being the perfect length (its length matching the distance between two average ocean wave crests), and being large enough (having a volume of approximately 1,396,000 cubic feet) to comfortably house the "two of every creature" stipulated in the Bible (as well as supplies for all present).
Unfortunately, this argument holds no water (pun intended), as many commenters were quick to point out:
"There's no evidence of a global flood, though, so the idea is allegory at best.
And even with a craft that large, it still would have been unable to store 2 of every species, let alone the food and environment to sustain those beasts."
- Whateverman
"Even if we assume Noah only took two million species (the total amount of species cataloged and named), and gathered them at a rate of one pair per minute, it would take nearly 1,400 years just to collect them all.
Let's forget the fact that Noah would need a round-the-clock staff of thousands upon thousands to take care of the animals already captured. "
- Kaitlyn
"The volume of the ark doesn't take into account the structural elements needed to keep the ship from snapping like a twig, so you can easily subtract 20% from the ammount of space. More actually, because that's the number used for normal-sized wooden ships, it doesn't include the upscaling.
And that's ignoring the fact that Noah would still need access to the animals, so that's another (conservative) 10% gone on walkways.
And in the square foot left, you don't only have to keep the animal, you also have to put food and water for a little under a year of travel time.
Not to mention the problem that some animals only eat fresh foods, such as koalas."
- Alcari
"Noah's Ark as described in Genesis is, on the one hand, too small for the task described. Assuming that biblical "kinds" correspond roughly to modern genera, the total weight of the animals placed aboard, plus fodder for them all for a year, would have exceeded the Ark's displacement, meaning that Noah would have constructed the world's first, and last, gopher-wood submarine.
On the other hand, it is too large for a craft constructed of wood (no metal is described as part of the construction). There's a reason that ships of that size were not built prior to the 19th century: before metal construction, ships of that would require most of their internal space to be taken up with bracing, assuming you didn't want them to simply bend, leak, and break up shortly after launching. The shape may be good; the construction materials are not adequate to a ship that size.
Of course, there are additional problems: if we accept that all terrestrial tetrapods alive today are descendants of animals on the Ark, we have a problem accounting for the genetic variety in many species (especially if one wishes to argue that, e.g. lions, tigers, pumas, house cats etc. are descendants of a single pair of ur-felids aboard the Ark): chimpanzees, for example, have vastly more genetic variety within their species than H. sapiens does. Every land vertebrate species on Earth should show signs of having gone through a very narrow genetic bottleneck some 5000 years ago, if the Noah's Ark account is true, yet scarcely any of them do."
- Steven J.
It should be clear at this point that the Ark fable that Richard Gunther originally attempted to portray as reasonable has several glaring problems. To us, this comes as no big surprise...but what I thought was worth mentioning was the reactions of some of the fundies to these arguments:
"There's no evidence because a group of people with a vested interest in the Bible not being 100% true say there's no evidence."- Jinx McHue
" With God's protection against extinction during the Deluge, survival would have been assured."
"It has been said that in nearly all groups of animals there is at least an indication of a latent ability to hibernate or aestivate. Perhaps these abilities were supernaturally intensified during this period. With their bodily functions reduced to a minimum, the burden of their care would have been greatly lightened."
- Trkent
So there you have it...rational objections to what is obviously a fairy tale are met with equal parts denial and even more magical thinking. I won't even get into the retarded "kinds vs. species" argument that invariably rises from this particular debate.
And fundies wonder why they're not taken seriously...
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