Funny Noah's Ark Q&A

[Sandpiper]

Seeing the thread about the Grand Canyon being created by Noah's flood reminded me of this. It comes from www.landoverbaptist.org, a parody site that lampoons fundamentalist christianity, in the Bible Study With Brother Harry section.

Q: how could noah possibly live to be 600 yrs?
how come noone has ever found the ark?

A: Dear Inquisitive (a/k/a Hellbound) One,

God must have made the ark disappear. That is the only explanation. Bear in mind that there were more than 50 million species of animals on the Earth (there were more than 500,000 species of beetles, alone). Yet, Noah managed to get at least two (and sometimes more) of each specie on the ark (Genesis 6:14-15). That's over 100 million animals, some of them the size of elephants, many of them carnivorous (and thus requiring isolation) and many of them requiring special housing arrangements for their environmental needs. And this still doesn't take into account the need for food storage (different food for different species), waste storage and/or removal and the like. An ark capable of accomodating all of this would be the size of a dozen Rhode Islands and would certainly have been located by now

Of course, the Bible says the ark was 450 feet long (even though the oldest ships built in that time, by expert shipbuilders, were 300 feet, and they required diagonal iron strapping for support and leaked so badly they had to be pumped constantly by countless men). If the ark was only 450 feet long, to house all those animals, it would have to be about 100 miles wide. That's a mighty big ship (Genesis 6:14-15).

Regarding Noah's age, this, too, must have been a miracle. But, then again, Noah HAD to live to be at least 600. After all, he had to travel to all different continents of the world to collect the 50 million plus species of animals (Genesis 7:8). Some of them were deep in the African and Amazonian jungles, yet Noah found them all. Then, after the Great Flood, he had to disperse the 100 million plus animals (minus those he sacrificed to God) back to their natural habitats deep within the seven continents. All of this would take hundreds of years for hundreds of men today with the benefit of modern technology. Yet, Noah did it all by his lonesome when technology consisted of wood and nails.

Frankly, the Bible would be far more realistic if it pegged Noah's age at 60,000 years. However, as always, the Bible has an explanation for the relatively short time span required to do all of this. There was plenty of time for collection and later dispersion because all of the 100 million plus animals boarded the ark "in the selfsame day" (Genesis 7:13-14). That means they would have boarded the ark at the rate of thousands a second. Pity, Continental and Delta don't have any Noahs working for them.

We shouldn't be surprised that God removed the ark. After all, God was depressed after killing every man, woman, child, infant and unborn child on the planet (except Noah and his kin). He even created the rainbow as a promise to the world that He would never destroy it again (Genesis 9:13). (Guess He forgot He was going to inspire the Book of Revelation a few thousand years later.) The ark was probably a painful reminder of this unfortunate mood swing and was hence destroyed.

Praying that we will all learn to accept the Bible by blind faith, notwithstanding its scientific impossibilities,

Brother Harry Hardwick