Bringing the animals to the ark

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Rescued from the

Global Flood

Icon flood.svg
Seven of the clean kind

The story of the Global flood, as related in the Bible, maintains that at least two of every clean large animal were present in a vessel somewhere in the Middle East. For young-Earth creationism to hold true this mandates that animals from all over the world had to travel thousands of miles to the ark. The species coming to the ark would have faced insurmountable obstacles.

Contents

[edit] Obstacles

There are dozens of major problems with taking the story of Noah's ark literally. These concentrate on the issues observed with getting the animals to the ark, preferably in one piece and within the time between Noah being informed of the flood (and ordered to build an ark) and God being a massive douche and slaughtering everyone on Earth.

[edit] The number of animals

The sheer number of animals on the ark is an issue on several levels. That this insanely high number of beasts would need to be transported to the ark is an issue in itself; a logistical nightmare if nothing else. However, creationists do, as always, have plenty of excuses to get out of this. As John Woodmorappe duly noted in his authoritative analysis, Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study, "[m]odern anti-creationists continue to resurrect long-discredited tomfooleries about the overcrowded Ark (sic)." [1] So, according to creationist theory, the ark therefore contained fewer than 16,000 animals, not millions as purported by Darwinists - who insist on calling members of the same baramin by different names. The diversity currently seen within the animal kingdom is a result of rapid post-flood speciation within created kind. This explanation is somewhat ironic as those who accept the flood tend to reject evolution outright, but getting from 16,000 species to several million in only a few thousand years[2] would require what is sometimes referred to as "magic super evolution".

[edit] Oceans

A long-discredited anti-creationist tomfoolery

Animals unique to Australia, Antarctica, the Americas, and every miscellaneous island would have been forced to cross oceans to reach their destinations. The claim that animals could swim this distance is bizarre, and at best just unconvincing. Most land mammals have very limited swimming capabilities. Monkeys, llamas, snakes, moose, and countless other animals would drown within minutes. Even if for a miracle all these animals were proficient swimmers they would have died of dehydration and starved to death long ago while they were swimming. So, short of saying that God magically whisked them to the right spot (i.e., Goddidit, which is boring and unimaginative), there's not much hope for the ark being remotely possible in a literal sense.

[edit] Distance

There are some animals that are too slow to make the journey. The sloth, for example, has an average speed of 5 feet per minute.[3] Even if the sloth could take a straight line from Central America to the Middle East, it be would still be a journey of more than 7000 miles--which would take roughly 14 years. This is assuming that it doesn't die en route, as described above.

[edit] Climate

The change in climate would also render the movement infeasible. Animals adapted to cold climate such as polar bears would die in the deserts of Palestine. This, again, assumes they didn't die en route due to drowning or starvation.

[edit] Predation

Predators would also render the migrants' journey a futile one. Penguins would be preyed upon mercilessly as they lack the mechanisms to defend against the predators of Africa or Asia. Even if the entire Antarctic had been depopulated and the penguins began a stoic journey across the ocean through Africa and then on to Palestine the chance of even one surviving is a long shot. The predators of the savanna: jackals, lions, and other predators would still outnumber them and the penguins would be unable to escape. Dodo birds would also be unable to make it. Being confined to a single island there were only several hundred of them at most. Being flightless and unable to move fast, the journey - had they attempted it - would have killed them.

[edit] Food

Some animals have very restricted diets: Koalas eat only eucalyptus leaves, a species not normally found in the Middle East; Pandas prefer bamboo, which has the same problem. To get around this, Noah and his family would have had to bring the animals and sufficient food with them (again, a logistical nightmare, even for thousands of individuals working with modern technology), or perhaps creationists imagine Mr and Mrs Koala making one hell of a packed lunch before heading out.

[edit] Creationist claims

Some creationists have suggested that all the animals before the flood would have lived in close proximity to the ark. This creates more problems than it solves. If all animals were suddenly lumped together in Palestine there would be mass extinctions, as all animals would not be able to coexist in the small climate; animals such as polar bears and penguins require cold environments while others such as cold blooded desert reptiles require hot environments. If it is suggested that the animals got those features after the flood, such pathways requires a mutation rate much higher than what evolution is currently accounting for, so it takes super-evolution to deny evolution, in a sense.

The lesser animals would also fall victim to the higher predators. Dodo birds and penguins do not have what it takes to compete with wolves and large cats. Marsupial mammals (such as kangaroos) don't do well competing with placental mammals (virtually every mammal outside of Australia, except for opossums in the Americas).

[edit] Supercontinent

Creationists sometimes claim that the animals would have been brought to the ark by 'homing instinct'.[4] They also say that before the flood all the land was in a single super continent.[5] This is a completely defective argument. Saying that the world was a single supercontinent only 4,500 years ago creates innumerable problems. It is true that there have been a number of supercontinents in the earth's history, but the most recent, Pangea, broke up over 200 million years ago.[6] We know that the world 2,000 years ago was about the same as it is now, so creationism requires that all the tectonic activity of 200 million years be compressed into 2,500 years. Tectonic shifting is what causes earthquakes so if the continents were to rearrange themselves so quickly it would be recorded in history. Primitive people would most likely be impressed by earthquakes measuring 10+ on the Richter scale happening every two weeks.

[edit] The obvious explanation

Goddidit, you atheistic, anti-school prayer evilutionists! God can do anything! It says so in the Bible.

[edit] The even more obvious explanation

It didn't happen. At all.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Woodmorappe, J: Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study, page 3. Institute for Creation Research, 1996.
  2. Or in a few hundred years. The dietary laws given to Moses during the Exodus, some time around 1491 BCE, less than a thousand years after the Flood in 2348 BCE, note many distinct species. There are a few references in the story of Abraham (the "Call of Abraham" is sometimes dated at 1921 BC) which hint at a modern variety of species - distinguishing species within "baramins" such as sheep from goats (both in the subfamily Caprinae) and donkeys from horses (genus Equus).
  3. HyperTextBook.com One foot/minute = 99.6115088 miles/year.
  4. answers in stupidity
  5. answers in stupidity
  6. Breakup of Pangea (200 mya - Present)
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