There once was a man named Noah
Who built an Ark for Jehovah
Though when built to spec
Its size is suspect -
‘Cause the mammals alone overflow her
In Genesis 6 God commands Noah to build an Ark 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide by 30 cubits high. Into this 41,000 m3 space he is supposed to cram ’every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort’ on the planet – and all the food necessary to feed them (the account is silent on what the carnivores on the Ark were supposed to eat – probably unicorns, manticores and mermaids) . Indeed, as any good creationist will tell you, every living species we see today was represented by a breeding pair on Noah’s ark (although these were only the ‘unclean’ ones – of the ‘clean’ ones there were seven of each). Fossil remains of animals that no longer exist are taken as evidence that, contrary to what God promises, some species of animals were left behind and thus we no longer have dinosaurs, trilobites, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs.. in fact the 99.999% of all species that have gone extinct in the history of life on the planet were all wiped out in ‘the flood’.
Leaving aside God’s really bad logistical management of a situation he was fully in control of, being omnipotent and all. The given size of the Ark truly reflects the world view of a loose affiliation of nomadic desert tribes around the fertile crescent a couple of thousand years ago. The estimated displacement of the ark, given the dimensions in the bible, is around 40,000 tons. It’s big, but not THAT big – certainly not big enough to contain a pair of each current animal species on the earth – and the food necessary to feed them all for over a year. In contrast the largest ship built in the 20th Century, the Seawise Giant had a displacement of over 564,000 tons
Some Creationist apologists have argued that when the bible states that Noah carried a pair of each ‘Kind’ of animal on the ark it means that the animals on the Ark were ancestor species of all of our current species and therefore he needed to stable far fewer animals than would first appear. Ironically the rate of change required to get from this hypothetical breeding stock of a few kinds or ‘Baramins’ to todays diversity of species in less than 6,000 years is far in excess of any observed or predicted rate of change from evolutionary theory.
