NOAH AND HIS ARK - PART 1

When I started this blog I figured I would have to read the bible again and I knew if I took it slowly and stopped to think about each verse as it came I would run into some problems.  I understand a lot about the bible as a whole so I had to put my holistic, albeit apologetic, understanding of said book to one side and take each chapter and verse as it comes.  As I started reading, the need for a rant came quickly...

  In Genesis chapters 6 to 9 we read a story about a man named Noah who made an ark because god told him to.  God said that he was, in essence, sick of the human race and all it's evilness so he was going to send a flood to wipe the humans and every other living thing of the face of the earth (paraphrase) except for Noah, his family and two of every kind of animal.  This may be one of the most argued stories of the bible, not only by believers and non believers but by one kind of a Christian and another.  This is the story I want to have a rant about.  

After reading these verses I kind of felt guilty of skim reading so I went back and started to read it again after which I realised I wasn't skim reading it's just written like that.  The complete lack of detail is stunning!  I guess I shouldn't really be surprised because up to that point the rest of Genesis is just as lacking which leaves it all up to liberal amounts of interpretation.  Interpretation is obviously one of the reasons for the myriad sects in Christianity but it begs the question; is the fear of no after-life driving us to ignore the absurdity of this tale?  I think it's a big part of it, for sure. 

If one employs critical thinking whilst trying to follow this biblical drivel it's impossible to read more than a verse without popping a neuron.  To accept the story of Noah and his ark as true one needs to suspend ones disbelief but to use it for one of the best pieces of evidence for the existence of god needs a special kind of denial.  The story is so full of holes it just doesn't float.  I mentioned before that the story itself is lacking in it's description of what actually happened so we don't have much to go on but it doesn't seem to stop people from coming up with wacky ideas about how it really happened.  Hypothesis is the generous word for that kind of behavior, otherwise known as apologetics. 

  So why, given the lack of any basis of fact, are millions of people prepared to believe it to be true?  In short, it's in the bible so it must be true.  If it wasn't true then that could bring other stories of the bible into question and before long the entire book starts to unravel before the believers eyes forcing them to ask the ultimate question... is there really a god?  In the end the head in the sand option wins out.

Lets start by looking at the obvious question; if god made the heavens, the earth, the animals and Adam and Eve how hard would it have been to make people that wouldn't go all evil and murderous enough to make god decide to clean the slate and start again?  What we have to remember is god made man is his image so what does that say about god?  A short tempered, over reactive, genocidal and jealous deity who doesn't seem to be able to create decent humans.  This is of course subjective but logical.
  God has no control over his creations.  The free will card can be played now if you like but that is a retrospective look at this story after reading the rest of the bible; at this point god has not bestowed free will upon the human race.  God has not given any ground rules or punishments or anything, the people are just doing what they do and god is to be blamed for being a bad parent.  There is no right or wrong, no good or bad and god hasn't demanded anything of man and when man dies, he dies.  He doesn't go to heaven and he doesn't go to hell; he just dies as that is gods punishment for eating the fruit of the forbidden tree.  It is what it is but he turns around and gets pissed because in his eyes they are acting like little shits.
  God is supposed to be in control but this just shows him to be an out of control spoiled brat and decides that he will kill not just mankind but every living thing the walks, swims or flies.  I think I would rather die than have to worship such a dick of a god just to live.

The plan is for Noah to build the ark while god gathers all the animals and they would all float off into the sunset together, so lets look at the plans... wait, there are none.  We have to trust that God gave Noah a little more to go on than 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high.  He is to make it with a roof (duh!) which has an opening underneath of 1 cubit (presumably to let the air circulate so the whole ship doesn't smell like crap).  It had lower, middle and upper decks with 1 cubit windows and a door in the middle.  To investigate the claim of Noah's ark made in the bible we have to assume no supernatural interference in the making otherwise it just falls to special pleading and reality takes a back seat.  My first question is:

What is a cubit?
  A cubit is, obviously, a measurement of length which probably died out with the dinosaurs as I don't think it is used for anything outside of hedging these days.  It was the average length from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger, around 46 cm or about 18 inches, which means the actual measurement could vary wildly.  Even with just a 1 cm difference on either side the ark could be anything from 135 m (443 ft) to 141 m (462 ft).  We'll work on the 46 cm basis from here.

It's hard to conceptualize the size of the ark so lets look at some comparisons.  Take your average sized high school football field and add another 120 feet and you start to get the idea.  Massive, right?  Absolutely.  It's a huge boat, enormous!
But is it big enough?  Is the size of this monolithic structure going to fit all the different "kinds" of animals in the world?  That question is actually way down on the list and we will get to that soon but first lets find out if building such a massive ship is possible.  God says it is to be made of cypress wood in the NIV (new international version) but the King James calls it gopher wood but we don't really know what that is and cypress is the closest guess so we'll go with that translation, either way it's a shit load of wood that's needed.  Lets look at that:

How much wood was needed?
In short it's around 40,500 square feet of wood.  There are not many places to get this information so it is an approximation only.  This is the basic math from ANSWERBAG "According to the Bible, each side of Noah's Ark was 300 cubits long and 30 cubits high. The square cubits of one side would be 9,000 cubits. Multiplied by two sides, Noah's Ark would take more than 1,800 square cubits, or 3,762 square meters, or 40,500 square feet of wood."  I have no reason to dispute this calculation.
  It took more than 6000 trees to make the HMS Victory, which was 69 m long, it would have taken more than 12000 tress to be cut down and prepped for the making of Noah's ark.  Where on earth did all those trees come from?  I can't tell you where the ark was made nor can I tell you how lush or arid that area was back then but 12000 trees (aprx) is a shit load for a small family to find, cut and process and that brings up the next question - did Noah have more than just his family to help him build the ark?  We'll explore that in part 2 of this series exploring Noah and his ark.

I write this blog because it is a passion of mine to explore the myth of god and along the way even I learn some cool stuff but it takes a lot of time and energy to write this blog.  If you enjoy reading this blog please make a donation by clicking the DONATE button on the right so I can put more time into creating a better blog.

Thank you all

Justin