Noah Had A Big Boat

As a kid I remember hearing the story of Noah and his ark and I believed every word of it. But as an adult, I am beginning to have some misgivings about this tale, mainly because I have developed the ability to think.

To begin with, I have a problem with what they called his boat. Why an ark? There are a lot of different names for boats. You can call it a ship, a vessel, a cruiser, a destroyer, a carrier, a dinghy, or a craft. His boat probably most resembles a houseboat, or since it carried animals, maybe we should be calling it a barnboat. So why an ark? But this is just semantics. Let's get to the real meat of the story.

According to Genesis, God began to regret making man. I was always taught that God knew everything, so how could He make a mistake? It also says in Genesis that God said that man's "lifetime shall be one hunded and twenty years." Can you imagine what that would do to social security?

Anyway God decided to destroy everything he created, man and beast, crawling creature and bird of the air. But he found favor in Noah. How did He decide that Noah was less evil than, say, a worm?

Then let's take the ark. God instructed Noah to make it three hundred cubits long and fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. Let's translate that into English. A cubit was about a foot and a half. So in a boat which was 450 feet long and 75 feet wide and 45 feet high, he was to cram two of every animal on earth into it. That's smaller than a football stadium.

I looked on the internet and found 36 different breeds of wild cats listed. And among domestic cats, God knows how many breeds exist. Dogs are another story. Imagine how many different types of dogs one finds on this Earth. And birds! Wow, can you imagine how much space it would take just to house a male and female of each species of bird? When you add reptiles and insects and other mammals, can you imagine the numbers? How could you possibly fit all of those into a football stadium? And what about fish? God wanted to destroy everything. Is a flood an effective way to destroy fish?

Here's another problem. God instructed Noah to load two of every type of animal. So what did the lions and other predators eat? If there were only two wildebeast on board, how long could the lions live on them? And if they ate them, how would that species continue? Two worms wouldn't have even been an appetizer for the two birds.

Gathering those animals wouldn't have been easy. Since this was close to the beginning of man's time on Earth, the ark was probably built in Africa or the Middle East, right? Well, how did the polar bears get on board? And the penguins? Did they swim the Atlantic Ocean to get to the ark? And if they could swim the Atlantic Ocean, why would they be afraid of a silly little flood?

Then let's talk about the flood itself. Genesis claims that the flood was the result of 40 days and 40 nights of rain. If that could cause a flood, you'd think Eugene, Oregon would have a similar flood every year. And this was no tiny flood. According to Genesis it covered all of the earth, and rose fifteen cubits above the highest mountain tops. Mount Everest reaches 8,850 meters. Add 15 cubits to this and translate it to feet and it comes to 26,595 feet. That's a lot of water. If you were in San Bernardino and swam to the top you'd get the bends.

Like I said, that's a LOT of water. I have a question for you. Where did all that water go when the flood ended? If it evaporated into the air, we'd have had a lot of cloud cover and a lot more rain, and probably a lot more floods. It doesn't just disappear, so where did it go? If it sank into the ground we'd have quicksand from the U.S. to China.

In chapter 8 of Genesis it says, "Then God remembered Noah, and all the wild animals and all the cattle that were with him in the ark." If God had instructed him to build this ark and load every living creature into it, and then created a flood to destroy everything else, how could he have even temporarily forgotten about Noah and the ark? Now He remembers?

Genesis also writes a confusing timeline. It says the flood lasted 40 days and that the water rose for 150 days. Does this mean it went on for 190 days total? Then it says in the seventh month on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark rested on the mountains of Aratat. If they are counting from the day the flood started, and there are an average of 30 days in a month, that comes to a total of 227 days. Then it says the waters receded until the tenth month. So that's 300 days. We still don't have a clue as to how long this flood actually lasted.

If I live to be a hundred and twenty years old, I probably still won't understand how this story could have actually happened.