The Flood That Didn't Happen

 There are people who believe the Holocaust didn’t happen.  There are people who believe the earth is flat.  There are people who believe that a few thousand years ago, a flood wiped the world clean except for a specific family and the land animals.  Of course, I'm talking about Noah's Ark.  According to the bible, God told Noah that the world was about to be flooded, and he should build a boat for all the animals and his family in which they could take refuge.  The size of this boat was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits tall.  A cubit, as I’m sure you’re aware, is the length of a grown man’s forearm, which averages roughly 18 inches.  So, using simple math, we can estimate the ark was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet tall with a total volume of 1,518,750 cubic feet.  To put that into perspective, consider that the new Dallas Cowboy’s Stadium contains 104 million cubic feet.  Noah’s ark would be 0.015% of the volume of the stadium, which holds up to 100,000 people.  Now, I accept that there was only one fairly large family, but if we take into account the animals, and I mean all of them, I’d wager that they’d run out of room fairly quickly.  The African elephant and Indian elephant would take up mounds of space, and let’s not forget all the species of insects, arachnids, equestrian species, canine breeds, etc. Are we to really believe that all these species fit into one boat?

But, let’s just pretend that Noah was able to pull some hockety pockety trick, and these animals were able to squish together tighter than an overcrowded animal shelter (abuse, much?).  What did they do about food and water? The African elephant consumes roughly 60 gallons of water in one day, and eats only plants, but cannot digest cellulose, which limits its food options to just over fifty types of food.  Elephants eat between 220 and 440 pounds of plant material in one day, most of it grass.  To put that in perspective, an average square bale of hay is 12 cubic feet and weighs between 80 and 140 lbs.  We’ll assume that Noah was able to bundle the elephants’ plant material into the tightest bales, weighing in at 140 lbs.  At minimum, an elephant would eat roughly a bale and a half, meaning 18 cubic feet per day.  One elephant eats a minimum of 720 cubic feet of food per day, and since there had to be at least four elephants it would take 2,880 cubic feet to feed them for forty days.  These are the food requirements for just elephants, so remember, there would have been zebras, horses, camels, antelope, porcupine, bats, sheep, hares, bilbies, chuckwallas, etc. that all eat plants on board.  Also, remember that the Dallas Cowboys Stadium contains enough food to serve the 100,000 maximum people for an afternoon of football, plus some. 

Again, let’s assume all the aforementioned things are logistically possible.  We’ll assume there was room enough for a conservative estimate of 1,000 animals and all their food, plus the food for carnivores.  What happened after the flood, when the ark was up at the top of a mountain?  We know there are plants and animals that are found exclusively in certain places in the world.  For example, Cephalotus follicularis grows only in southwestern Australia near the coast.  Seeds might be explained by the idea that when the flood waters disperse, the seeds floated and clung together somehow so they ended up in certain areas of the world, but what about animals? 

The kiwi, for example, is a flightless bird found only in New Zealand.  The specific species of kiwis have specific types of feather louse found on only one species, respectively.  If all the kiwi species were once shut up on a boat together, wouldn't you expect to find louse and hosts overlapping?  After the flood waters vanished, the kiwis had to travel down the mountainous terrain and make their way to New Zealand.  For those of you who aren’t aware, there’s an ocean between Turkey and New Zealand. Kiwis can neither fly nor swim, so not only did the kiwi have to travel the 10,500 miles from the Turkish mountains to New Zealand, but the flightless, now extinct, moas has to come along.  Additionally, emus had to travel to Australia.  Rheas, flightless birds which live in places that have similar climates to those of ostriches and emus, had to find their way to South America.  Don’t forget, these flightless animals, essentially defenseless against such predators as leopards, lions, and wolves made these journeys while bears and tigers did not.  These unlikely travelers made it to such bizarre places like New Zealand, but did not end up anywhere else.  If rheas can live in the Pampas of Argentina, why don’t they inhabit the grasslands of southern Africa which, by comparison, is right next door to Turkey?  Furthermore, fossilized rheas are found in America only.  None have been found anywhere between Turkey and South America.  Curious, no?

Another perplexing question Noah’s story poses is the exclusive club that Australian mammals belong to.  The marsupial population of Australia contains animals found nowhere else on earth, with the exception of modern zoos.  The savannah region of Africa bears a markedly similar resemblance to the grasslands of Australia, yet we don’t find kangaroos in Africa.  Again, remember how much closer Africa is to Turkey than Australia.

Yet another problem with the idea of a worldwide flood  is the aquatic life.  Is it not astonishing that 170 species of cichlid fishes settled out of the biblical brine into Lake Victoria, but not into any other lake in the world, including lakes only several miles from Lake Victoria? What about the poisonous stonefish that is found in Australia and nowhere else?  I find it rather difficult to believe that fish that require saltwater to survive and fish that require fresh water to survive managed to live through a muddy flood, and I think it’s safe to assume the water would be terribly muddy considering how murky the waters of a clear river are after a slight rainstorm. 

Additionally, there are records of humans existing in America before, during, and immediately after the flood supposedly killed them.  So, which is more likely:  That a flood wiped the world of all breathing life, spared the aquatic life, and then the animals traveled impossible distances over oceans, mountains, and continents, or ancient texts were severely mistaken?


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