Thread: How could Noah's Ark hold all those animals?

Originally Posted by Quest

I don't actually feel I NEED TO KNOW how He did it....

Even if there were no people on the slopes of Kilimanjaro or in the Himalayas there would have been animals that survived. The Himalayas would have contained vast areas above sea level, including vegetation enough to sustain people climbing up the slopes as the water rose. People try to solve this by claiming that there were no people outside the middle east area or that all other mountain ranges were lower than Ararat at that time but it boils down to a form of reverse engineering that ends up making little sense. An absolutely literal reading of the account makes little sense. Not at the small level of the ark and the animals as there are many possible scenarios for that, but at the global level.

Originally Posted by Colonel

Even if there were no people on the slopes of Kilimanjaro or in the Himalayas there would have been animals that survived. The Himalayas would have contained vast areas above sea level, including vegetation enough to sustain people climbing up the slopes as the water rose. People try to solve this by claiming that there were no people outside the middle east area or that all other mountain ranges were lower than Ararat at that time but it boils down to a form of reverse engineering that ends up making little sense. An absolutely literal reading of the account makes little sense. Not at the small level of the ark and the animals as there are many possible scenarios for that, but at the global level.

The virgin birth doesn't make sense either...

Originally Posted by Quest

The virgin birth doesn't make sense either...

It makes perfect sense if one believes in the miraculous.

I see no reason that every element of Noah's flood had to be either entirely natural or supernatural. It was a combo.

Originally Posted by fuego

I see no reason that every element of Noah's flood had to be either entirely natural or supernatural. It was a combo.

The literal reading seems to indicate that the water levels were affected supernaturally but the account doesnt mention anything else than that. The absence of a rainbow until after the flood indicates different atmospheric conditions before the flood. Almost anything is conceivable in terms of the ark and what was on the ark but it seemes far fetched that God would rearrange the entire globe supernaturally just to make the whole thing work. Make mountains higher or lower, hide the effects of the flood covering everything etc. We dont necessarily understand everything about that but still. The notion that it happened only 4-5000 years ago makes things worse. Much more is possible if the real number is hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

Originally Posted by Colonel

Ararat is the highest mountain in the region but not in the world etc. That account is the most puzzling in the Bible, to me.

According to the Bible, the ark didn't come to rest on a mountain singular, rather, on mountains plural. (Gen 8:3b-4)

Mountains is not only plural, but the Hebrew word can also indicate a range of hills and/or highlands instead of prominent land masses like Everest or McKinley.

The Hebrew word for "Ararat" is from 'Ararat (ar-aw-rat') which appears three more times in the Bible: one at 2Kgs 19:36-37, one at Isa 37:36-38, and one at Jer 51:27. 'Ararat is always the country of Armenia: never a specific mountain by the same name.

Highlands have their advantages. In California, where I lived as a kid, the local elevation 35 miles east of San Diego, in the town of Alpine, was about 2,000 feet above sea level.

The air quality at that time was excellent, and there were plenty of meadows with pasture and good soil. In fact much of it was very good ranchland and quite a few people in that area raised horses and cows. My parents kept about five hundred chickens, and a few goats and calves. We lived in the mountains of San Diego; but we didn't live up on top of one of its mountains like Viejas, Lyon's, or Cuyamaca.

The ark contained the only surviving souls of man and animal on the entire planet. Does it really make good sense to strand them up on a mountain peak where they might risk death and injury descending it?

When my wife and I visited the San Diego zoo together back in the early 1980's, we noticed that the Giraffes' area had no fence around it. The tour guide told us the Giraffes' enclosure doesn't need a fence because their area is up on a plateau 3 feet high. The Giraffes don't try to escape because they're afraid of heights. There's just no way Giraffes could've climbed down off of Turkey's Mount Ararat. It's way too steep and rugged. Those poor timid creatures would've been stranded up there and died; and so would hippos, elephants, and flightless birds like penguins

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Originally Posted by fuego

LCash's theory that the flood was regional, not global.

The Bible's language and grammar doesn't permit regional flooding.

†. Gen 7:19-20 . .When the waters had swelled much more upon the earth, all the highest mountains everywhere under the sky were covered. Fifteen cubits higher did the waters swell, as the mountains were covered.

Assuming a cubit to be 18 inches; the waters breeched the highest mountains by 22½ feet. So then, if perchance Noah lived in a geographic basin, the waters would have overflowed the mountains surrounding him and kept on going.

But the water would start spilling past Noah's area long before it breeched the tops of the highest mountains surrounding him because mountain ranges aren't shaped smooth, flat, and level like the rim of a domestic bath tub. No; they're very irregular and consist of high points and low points; viz: peaks, valleys, canyons, saddles, and passes.

Thus mountain ranges make poor bath tubs because you would lose water through the low points before it even had a chance to fill to the peaks. In point of fact, were the sides of your bathtub shaped like a mountain range; you could never fill it. And in trying to; just end up with water all over the floor.

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Originally Posted by fuego

To me it was obviously a supernatural thing, since of course it had to be supernatural for all those animals to come to that one place and get on the boat.

How did they get across oceans?

In the past that was doubtless a thorny theological problem. But with today's knowledge of the geological science of plate tectonics, the answer is as simple as two plus two. Scientists now know that continental land masses can be shifted, and in point of fact the dry parts brought so close together as to form one single super continent.

Scientists also know about magma hot spots and pressure points that can raise and lower the earth's crust like a service elevator. Subduction no doubt played a role by pushing sea beds up above sea level and made to form land bridges; thus expediting migration.

This idea is by no means novel. For example: in its early history; the Dead Sea was home to the Sedom Lagoon. In those days, water from the Red Sea was able to ebb in and out of the lagoon because the region hasn't always been land-locked like it is today. At one time the earth's crust south of the valley was lower; allowing the Jordan River an outlet; but over time, tectonic forces altered the region resulting in the river, and the lagoon, losing access to the waters of the Mediterranean.

In 2014, a 9,000 year-old stone structure used to capture caribou was discovered 120 feet below the surface of Lake Huron; and is the most complex structure of its kind in the Great Lakes region.

The structure consists of two parallel lanes of stones leading to a cul-de-sac. Within the lanes are three circular hunting blinds where prehistoric hunters hid while taking aim at caribou. The structure's size and design suggest that hunting was probably a group effort, with one group driving caribou down the lanes towards the blinds while another group waited to attack.

The site-- discovered by using sonar technology on the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, 35 miles southeast of Alpena Michigan --was once a dry land corridor connecting northeastern Michigan to southern Ontario.

Normal geological processes take thousands of years to accomplish, but when you factor in the creator's participation in the Flood event, it's no problem at all for a supreme being who has absolute power over not just the earth's geological processes; but all the rest of nature's processes too.

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Originally Posted by krystian

How could all those animals fit on the ark?

I think it's a mistake to assume that every variety of life today existed in Noah's day. Instead what we are seeing in our day is the result of millennia of somatic mutations and adaptations.

Also, the Bible says that Noah was to take aboard animals that "shall come to you" (Gen 6:19-20); which implies of course that species who failed to come got left behind and went extinct in the Flood.

Originally Posted by krystian

How did they feed them?

Some have proposed that the animals hibernated so they wouldn't have to be fed very often nor require much room for exercise nor would they generate much manure to clean up. That's actually a very plausible explanation. For example: arctic ground squirrels can lower their body temperature below freezing and avoid serious head injuries while hibernating for as long seven months. Why the little guys don't freeze to death is a mystery.

Others have proposed that Noah didn't actually load an entire year's supply of food aboard the ark. Just a minimum amount that God then miraculously sustained. That too is a very plausible explanation.

For example: there are incidents in the Bible where small amounts of food stuffs were miraculously multiplied. One example is 1Kgs 17:8-16 where a tiny bit of flour and oil nourished Elijah and a widow woman, and her son, for a good many days during a time of prolonged drought.

Another incident is at 2Kgs 4:1-7 where a certain widow's husband died and left her deeply in debt. God multiplied her last pot of oil sufficiently to sell enough to pay off her debts, thereby saving her two sons from slavery.

At 1Kgs 19:5-9, when Elijah was running away from that horrible Jezebel, he was fatigued and napping under a bush when a messenger of God woke him up to eat a single biscuit and drink some water. Elijah survived on the nourishment of that measly little snack for the next forty days.

I'm not insisting that God sustained everyone aboard the ark via hibernation and/or like He did Elijah and the widows. But in the light of nature's examples, and the Bible's examples, it isn't unreasonable to believe that's exactly what happened. Many details remain a mystery and apparently God didn't feel it was important for everybody to know how He and Noah did it. Well; that's His decision and I respect it; but I still wish Genesis told us more.

Originally Posted by krystian

How come they didn't eat each other?

In the beginning God designated vegetation for not only man's sustenance, but also the animals. (Gen 1:29-30)

But even at that; carnivores can be domesticated when the situation calls for it. Take for example Daniel in the den of lions. None tried to eat him. And according to Isa 11:6-9 and Isa 65:25, there's a day coming when the nature of carnivores will be changed to that of herbivores.

Originally Posted by krystian

How did they . . . clean up after them?

The ark had a pretty generous window.(Gen 6:16)

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Originally Posted by Colonel

Even if there were no people on the slopes of Kilimanjaro or in the Himalayas there would have been animals that survived. The Himalayas would have contained vast areas above sea level, including vegetation enough to sustain people climbing up the slopes as the water rose.

The discovery of fossilized sea lilies near the summit of Mt Everest proves that the Himalayan land mass has not always been mountainous; but at one time was the floor of an ancient sea bed. This is confirmed by the "yellow band" below Everest's summit consisting of limestone: a type of rock made from calcite sediments containing the skeletal remains of countless trillions of organisms who lived, not on dry land, but in an ocean.

"He established the Earth on its foundations, so that it shall never totter. You made the deep cover it as a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. They fled at your blast, rushed away at the sound of your thunder-- mountains rising, valleys sinking to the place you established for them. You set bounds they must not pass so that they never again cover the Earth." (Ps 104:5-9)

Psalm 104 is stunning; and clearly way ahead of its time. It says that the land masses we know today as mountains were at one time submerged; and it isn't talking about Noah's flood. The speech of "mountains rising, and valleys sinking" isn't Flood-speak, no, it's geology-speak.

I seriously doubt that the Psalmist knew about the science of tectonic plates, magma pressure, and the forces of subduction, but he was clearly somehow aware that the Earth's crust is malleable. And that's true. With just the right combination of temperature and pressure, solid rock can be made to bend; even forced to hairpin back upon itself like taffy.

At any rate, any attempts to escape the rising water would have been futile. Large amounts of water are very heavy, as every surfer who ever wiped out knows first hand. The volume of water falling down from the sky would have precluded the possibility of climbing even a jungle gym. It would have hammered people to death like squashing bugs with a fly swatter

Let's say, just for fun, that the highest mountain in Noah's day was about equal to California's Mount Laguna east of San Diego; viz: 5,738 feet above sea level-- about 1.1 miles. Adding 22½ feet to that comes out to approximately 5,761 feet.

The amount of rain it would take to accumulate that much water in only forty days would be something like six feet of depth per hour.

To put that in perspective: the lobby of the Empire State Building in New York city is approximately 47 feet above sea level. At 6 feet per hour, the lobby would be under water in less than eight hours. The whole building, lightening rod and all; would be under water in just a little over ten days. The new One World Trade Center would be gone in about thirteen. The water would reach Denver Colorado in like 37 days.

There was nowhere to hide.

†. Gen 7:21-23a . . And all flesh that stirred on earth perished-- birds, cattle, beasts, and all the things that swarmed upon the earth, and all mankind. All in whose nostrils was the merest breath of life, all that was on dry land, died.

. . . All existence on earth was blotted out-- man, cattle, creeping things, and birds of the sky; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.

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