Noahs Ark

The Miracle of Noah's Ark

The miraculous event that we know of in the story of Noah's Ark is a greater miracle than first meets the eye of the reader. Here are at least a few of the things to consider about what we know about the reality of such an event so that we can appropriately marvel at the fascinating power of God.

First there is rainfall. A quick trip to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain will show you that very heavy rainfall is 50mm/hour (generously, about 2 inches per hour). In order for the whole world to be flooded in 40 days and 40 nights, you would require approximately 14ft/hr (that is, not just to flood the world, but to fill the whole world high up to the peaks of Mt. Ararat). 14 feet per hour around the world, even over the oceans for 40 days and 40 nights. So this miraculous event also requires that God is not just manipulating existing water sources to make it rain but rather pouring water down onto earth from a supernatural supply of water. During the flood event there would have to be a lot more hydrogen and oxygen on the planet than there was before and after the event.

Now this does create a problem. Heavy rains create mudslides and wreak fascinating damage on the vegetation and landscapes under normal heavy rainfall conditions. A deluge like this one, 84 times more volume than the heaviest rains we have ever documented, would have literally stripped the earth of all of its current features of forests and human cities. It would erode away pretty handily layers and layers of sediment jumbling it all up into a huge unintelligible mess. Since that is NOT what we find when we look into the archeological record, it must be assumed that God held into perfect place all the existing features of the earth so that the flood that he poured out would not harm the historical record that his earth keeps for us. Either that or perhaps after the flood he went back and put everything back into place so that the damage from the deluge would not remain a permanent feature over the face of the earth. Either way, what a remarkable display of supernatural power. AND WE ARE JUST GETTING STARTED!!

One does not have to spend much time cruising around the internet in order to find all the arguments for and against the Ark. Again wikipedia is a great place to start to find all these arguments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noahs_Ark. It really quickly digresses into a lot of “blah, blah, blah” for the average reader who might not have the appetite for all the scientific back and forth, but it doesn't really matter what the arguments are. Every good argument for why it could not have happened is another opportunity for God's power to act and for us to recognize the multiple-miracle of the Ark. I'm going to address some of these below.

First lets get some sense of the time period and whether it was a “local” or “global” event. In order to kill all the people in the world and be a “local” event, all the people in the world would have to be in one localized area. The flood would have to have occurred some 200,000 or more years ago when all humans were localized to Africa. But the culture that is described in the Bible at the time included tools which didn't exist those earlier human cultures and the language that it is described in (Hebrew) certainly implies that it happened during Hebrew history so that the flood would have to have happened 3500 to 5000 years ago. At this time in history humans were distributed all over the world, even through the Americas. So for it to be a local event God would have had to compel all the humans in the remote parts of the world simultaneously migrate (probably together with the pairs of animals that had to come from all over the world) to the Middle East so he could kill them all there with a local flood. We should not probably second guess what the Bible says here though. We should probably assume that it WAS a global event and that it happened 3500 to 5000 years ago and so that God could kill everyone in the world right where they lived throughout the earth.

Now for the migration of the animals. Once again God shows his endless supernatural powers. Animals who were clearly preserved by an uninterrupted fossil record across Europe, Asia, to the Americas, in isolated Australia, Antarctica and all the remote islands, had to start flying, walking, swimming years in advance at God's beckoning and must have been preserved by God miraculously along the way as they left behind the habitats and food supplies that they normally depend on, pass through climates that would kill them normally, pass by predators that would normally kill them, either reproducing with their mates along the way so that their progeny could make it to the Ark or having their lives miraculously sustained by God so they could make it. Once again, he is a supernatural God so he could have just transported them all miraculously to the Ark and avoided the long, anticipatory trail of miracles required to get all these animals from around the world over to the Middle East. However, again, since the Bible paints a picture of the animals all coming to the Ark two by two (and multiples of some required for food and sacrifice) I think we should not second guess him. In other places in the Bible there are references to transportation miracles by “chariots of fire” and such so I would assume that God could easily have told us about a transportation miracle if he used such a method and still be miraculous. But how much more miraculous that these animals even survived such a journey. Think about it. How many years in advance do the indigenous worms, insects, rodents etc. of South America have to start struggling across the plains, through the deserts, over mountains and such in order to arrive on time to make the Ark? Remember, in order for all these varieties to exist today in the fossil record either they each had to travel to Israel to be preserved, or God miraculously reinvented and redistributed them from their Middle Eastern cousins who survived on the Ark. God is an amazing God!!

So then they arrive and sort themselves out into the pens on the Ark cooperatively. Predators and prey miraculously disregarding their normal roles and instead obeying the direction of the 8 people that God decided not to kill. The floods come and these 8 people miraculously take care of all of these different animals. In a continuation of the previous miracle, all the animals that are out of their normal habitat
(which I think is pretty much ALL of them once they are on the Ark) are sustained against sickness and disease. Five people miraculously have all the right kinds of food for them all and feed them appropriately, OR they somehow brought their own food with them from their various locations OR God miraculously sustained them all without food. Really its not that much more of a miracle than what he has done so far in this story anyway so perhaps he would have done this since it seems
easier. Also, if God just sustained them miraculously without food, that might also remove the necessity of the chosen 5 humans to clean up all the excrement from the thousands of different species on the Ark as it floated for perhaps over a year (inferred from the Biblical account).

Also now think of the miracle that is occurring in the seas. For a period of one year God must have maintained the lives of all the various sea creatures and plants. Certainly if left to mix, all the water on earth would have become either salty or diluted fresh. So some or all of the fish in the world had to be sustained against the changes in saline, OR God maintained areas of fresh and salt water miraculously for each type of sea life. Additionally, the many cubic tons of weight added to the oceans would have crushed the bottom dwelling sea life under normal conditions. So God either made them all capable of sustaining the weight so they could survive OR he held the weight up off of those creatures for the duration. Furthermore, some areas of the ocean, nearer the shores have sea life that depends partially on the availability of sunlight and the warming effects that it has on the shallower waters. Miles more of ocean water dumped on top of these locations would make it so that the sunlight could not reach those plants and animals. So again, God either miraculously made these creatures capable of living without their normal environmental conditions of sunlight and sea temperature OR he caused the seas to not act as they normally would so that the sunlight could penetrate to those locations.

So it was roughly after a year that God removed from the earth the many many cubic miles of H2O that he dumped onto the earth, back up into his supernatural cisterns or to the utter oblivion from which it all came. Here is where, perhaps, the greatest miracles of the Ark story begins.

The animals now begin their long trek back to all the places in the earth from which they came, continuing the miracle of survival though inappropriate climates and disregarding their normal predatory and prey oriented natures. Either each individual species of related animals from the remotest locations were represented on the Ark and migrated (or were transported) back to their original positions from the Ark after the waters dried. Or since some would claim that you didn't need EVERY species, just every KIND (a pair of wolves is all you need to get all the related dog like creatures in the world). That means that each KIND would then begin to reproduce and rapidly speciate into the many species that existed before the flood and THEN migrated back to the positions that their cousins inhabited before they got there with all of the climatological and environmental adaptations properly defined so that they could pickup where their cousins left off without damaging the fossil record. All this while leaving no hint that the flood even happened. Not only that, but they miraculously have, fully intact, the genetic material that demonstrates their direct relationship to cousins that they replaced and/or no evidence that the populations of those animals had decreased to some tiny number of individuals!! THATS COOL!!

Now you have to ask “What are they coming back to?”. All the original habitats that had existed before the deluge either were miraculously preserved from being washed away by the original deluge, preserved from dying with no light or air for about a year, flourishing and prepared to receive the animals that had abandoned them so that they could be rescued (Noah wasn't charged to take one of each kind of plant with him). Either that OR all of these habitats were miraculously restored by God without the need for preservation. Of course that explanation makes you ask why the animals would need to be preserved on the Ark but entire ecosystems of plants, fungi etc could just be miraculously replaced in a second Genesis type of event. So it seems like miraculously preserving them is a better interpretation...BUT if God would just miraculously preserve the plants and habitats that would have been normally destroyed by such a flood, why would he bother to go to the trouble of the long string of miracles required to transport to and preserve the animals by use of the Ark in the first place? Not really sure here but it doesn't really matter because no matter how he did it, it was miraculous, right?

So then finally we have these 8 people that God saved from the flood. The only people in the world that God didn't kill. And they have to replenish the earth with people. Here is where God performs yet another series of miracles that should leave you in awe of him. These 8 Hebrews then begin to procreate and then their children really really rapidly migrate and morph into the thousands of different people groups that existed at the time of the flood. They migrate to those different locations of the world and find the villages and cultures of their cousins preserved miraculously by God so that they can pick up the many cultural differences, arts, crafts, languages, superstitions, rituals and religions without making a break in the archaeological record. Then all these replaced people pick right back up on the civilization they had before the flood and leave no trace of such a flood event. No flood story in their faith or lore. Whoa! Wait. I thought the purpose of this was to ELIMINATE all the wicked people who don't worship the one true God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

So, God performs this absolutely fascinating series of pointless and irrational miracles, when as miracles go, it would have been a lot quicker and more efficient to just send the Angel of Death around and kill everyone. How and why he would kill everyone in the world just so that he could immediately go back and recreate the very cultures that would have been destroyed; and how and why he would miraculously cover his tracks so that his perfect Earth which happily keeps a historical record of what happens and roughly when, has no evidence that such a cataclysmic event ever happened, is inescapably ridiculous. Or do you want to put the time of the flood back so far in human history that we were all in Africa (maybe 150,000-200,000 years ago) so that God doesn't have to be responsible for recreating the Aztec heathens, or the wicked and remote villages of people on Papua New Guinea. That would mean that God got pissed and destroyed humans before we started wearing clothes (70,000 years ago), had agriculture or animal husbandry (10,000 years ago) and before the Hebrew tribe existed (5000ish years ago). That clearly doesn’t make any sense. Besides, that doesn't fix anything, because the descendants of the 8 still have to migrate back into lower Africa, become darker black again and pick up all the cultures of the tribes that preceded the Hebrews.

The only way to sustain belief in the Noah's Ark myth as a real historical event, is to maintain a pretty healthy degree of ignorance as to the implications of the story. I would like to hope that if you read this and thought about it at all, that you are no longer ignorant of those implications. Hopefully you recognize that it is a myth. However, if you choose to accept it as a myth, a parable, a legend that is included by God in the Bible for some instructional, inspirational purpose then you have begun to make your own decisions about what is a myth and what is “truth” in the Bible. Good luck with that. You will either have to put your head down, put your hands in your ears and yell “lalalalalala” so that you can push past the problems you will encounter or you will find yourself continuously challenged by a belief system that we should have long outgrown.

People often experience fear when they begin to confront their doubts about their faith. That fear is natural and normal. It is a fear of rejection. That you will be ostracized by your friends and family. Fear of rejection is the only emotion that we experience in the same part of our brain as actual physical pain. Once upon a time, if you were rejected by your tribe, if you were ostracized and put out of the community, you probably got eaten by the saber toothed tiger. You at least did not get to eat with the group anymore or stay in the shelter with them. Rejection meant almost certain death. So it is not surprising that we have a strong compulsion to “remain in the faith” with our “tribe”. Therefore it is not actually “irrational fear” so much as it is “obsolete fear”. We simply have not evolved past the need for that fear. So it is a big step that many can not take to drop the false constructs of religion and maintain a rational philosophy of life, love, community and pursuit of happiness without religion. Many people who have confronted their lack of faith personally, will never admit it to their families and friends and will even raise their children to remain in the faith in a superstitious hope that their children will find the God that they didn't. Not realizing that if you just start with the Golden Rule, you will find that it is perfectly logical and rational and that when you strip away all the supports that your faith seem to provide for your beliefs, they (your actual beliefs) will stand on their own based on the reality of their own truth. Any that don't, you will find, simply are not true and probably have only complicated your life and the lives of those around you.

So my hope here was not to smash peoples faith, but rather to focus it on reality and inspire you to find out what you really believe. Hopefully this succeeded.