I found a challenge on quora:
"The ark couldn’t even have floated."
According, apparently, to a link, given here:
The Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark
Reviewed by Robert A. Moore
Creation/Evolution Journal | Volume 4 | No. 1 | November 10, 2008
https://ncse.ngo/impossible-voyage-noahs-ark
For this post, I think not only my usual copyright notice for my own work applies, but also the one where someone else's copyright is involved.
A little note on further use conditions
https://hglwrites.wordpress.com/a-little-note-on-further-use-conditions/
Copyright issues on blogposts with shared copyright
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/p/copyright-issues-on-blogposts-with.html
Because, here I am not making a smaller quote with a big comment, I am quoting about as much as I am commenting. I still think this is fair use, morally, though.
You see, the article is a very great overview in very big detail of objections against Noah's Ark. And there should be an equally detailed answer, about same length (or comparable, closer to double than to same) which is why I am using it for my answer.
And so, I sign here instead of below, since after each, I might want to insert sth.
Hans Georg Lundahl
St. Germain en Laye
Ash Wednesday
26.II.2020
PS, this is actually only part I of at least II./HGL
"Only one, the Great Pyramid of Cheops, comes within two thousand years of Noah's day, and it is really the only one whose construction could conceivably approach the level of sophistication of the ark."
Cheops is dated 2589–2566 BC. Supposing some of the dates reasonably associated with him deal with carbon rather than later writings, this is during the time the Israelites stayed in Egypt - that is c. 1252 to 1447 years after the Flood.
"Imhotep, inspired by the ziggurats of Babylon, built the Step Pyramid around 2680 BC, passing through some intermediate step pyramids to the Bent Pyramid of Snofru, then the first true pyramid, and finally the masterpiece at Cheop (Stewart, pp. 35-39)."
Imhotep being Joseph and using that as granaries would be c. 1700 BC.
"On the other hand, in an era when hollowed-out logs and reed rafts were the extent of marine transport, a vessel so massive appeared that the likes of it would not be seen again until the mid-nineteenth century AD."
Actually, the "reed rafts" (I don't think you got those right, rafts being flatter than reed boats) are post-Flood and don't tell us anything of pre-Flood levels of technology.
"Before he could even contemplate such a project, Noah would have needed a thorough education in naval architecture and in fields that would not arise for thousands of years such as physics, calculus, mechanics, and structural analysis. There was no shipbuilding tradition behind him, no experienced craftspeople to offer advice. Where did he learn the framing procedure for such a Brobdingnagian structure? How could he anticipate the effects of roll, pitch, yaw, and slamming in a rough sea? How did he solve the differential equations for bending moment, torque, and shear stress?"
Mainly, Noah was not navigating. It was enough that God knew these things. Slamming will typically not happen to a vessel that doesn't navigate but drifts along the waves.
I have calculated the rolling period, and it was comfy enough. Perhaps Noah could even have placed the animals so as to get an even better rolling period:
Creation vs. Evolution : Rolling Period of Ark?
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2018/08/rolling-period-of-ark.html
"nearly a millennium passed while Egyptian boat lengths increase from 150 to 200 feet (Casson, p. 17)."
Regaining pre-Flood skills took time. Tubal-Cain knew Iron, Copper and Tin, and made Iron and Bronze. After the Flood and indeed after Babel, you get Neolithic, finding gold in Varna, and Bronze Age, before you find iron again. And before Neolithic, you even had Upper Palaeolithic, most of Noah's post-Flood years.
The named millennium (if even such) in Egyptian reed boat lengthening was
part of the recovery process.
"Obviously, the astronomical leap in size, safety, and skill required by Noah is far too vast for any naturalistic explanation."
As believing God gave the instructions, we don't need one.
"Yet Noah's primary contribution to humanity, his incredible knowledge of naval engineering, vanished without a trace, and the seafarers returned to their hollow logs and reed rafts. Like a passing mirage, the ark was here one day and gone the next, leaving not a ripple in the long saga of shipbuilding."
Getting to Australia while there was a Sahul-Sunda strait would have required far less, and after the Flood mankind had less metal resources. To Americas one got over Bering, similar to Sahul Sunda, or over Atlantis.
"These and countless other technical problems all had to be resolved before the first termite crawled aboard,"
And you assume all of God's instructions were transmitted in detail?
You assume termites were ever on the Ark? What if they diverged from ants post-Flood or survived on floating timber?
"Apparently, when God first told Noah to build an ark, he supplied a complete set of blueprints and engineering details, constituting the most intricate and precise revelation ever vouchsafed to humankind."
Yep. However, the only things
we are told of them are the overall proportions, three floors, door and window, and the water line, 15 cubits.
A full description of the instructions would have been impossible to squeeze into a short text meant for oral transmission.
"LaHaye and Morris tell us that Noah and his three sons could have built the entire thing by themselves in a mere eighty-one years (p. 248). This includes not merely framing up a hull but: building docks, scaffolds, workshops; fitting together the incredible maze of cages and crates; gathering provisions for the coming voyage; harvesting the timber and producing all the various types of lumber from bird cage bars to the huge keelson beams—not to mention wrestling the very heavy, clumsy planks for the ship into their exact location and fastening them. What's worse, by the time the job was finished, the earlier phases would be rotting away—a difficulty often faced by builders of wooden ships, whose work took only four or five years (Thrower, p. 32)."
The problem of ships rotting in four to five years was not there when building on a mountain top (which were flatter before the Flood). He built it on a mountain top geographically known to be the highest of the entire globe before the Flood and when the Ark started floating, he knew it had been flooded 15 cubits over its height.
Docks would for that reason not have been necessary. Also a reason why a box with flat sides (not going to navigate, only float and drift, so no streamlining) is theoretically preferrable over the Durupınar hull with a clear keel. With no hull that bends outwards as it goes up, no need to have floating docks to get to higher parts of the Ark. Ladders will do, unless they used sand or earth ramps.
And with no keel, also no keelson. And with no streamline bending, forget the problem of "wrestling the very heavy, clumsy planks for the ship into their exact location and fastening them."
Planks is wrong, if we have
any preserved meaning of gopher, it its square timber. Thicker than anyone could bend into a bent hull. It is either that or an unknown tree variety or an unknown way of treating wood, see answer after next one.
"Faced with such criticism, the creationists quickly convert the humble, righteous farmer into a wealthy capitalist who simply hired all the help he needed (Segraves, p. 86-87). It is estimated that the construction of the Great Pyramid required as many as 100,000 slaves; Noah could have probably gotten by with less (there were, after all, "giants in the earth in those days" according to Genesis 6:4), but what he lacked in numbers he sorely needed in experienced and highly skilled craftsmen."
More than capitalist, I would suggest feudal lord. Or king. BUT not in power (or he would have fixed certain misdeeds instead of just preaching against them). And in power doesn't mean merely recognised, it means obeyed. He could have been patriarch of a Sethite tribe separate from Cainites, a bit like how Abraham was in relation to leaving Ur Kasdim.
"How did he learn when to fell a tree and how to dry it properly to prevent rot and splitting, when the larger beams might take several years to cure (cf. Dumas and Gille, p. 322)?"
I have suggested that gopher wood might mean plywood or sth similar, gopher is an unknown kind of trees, and LXX translates "cut/square timber". This suggests, "gopher wood" is in fact a type of treatment of the wood material, known in pre-Flood times, but not early post-Flood times, and it could have been recently recovered in plywood. If the Durupınar site is correct, we have instead specially treated wood. Thick timber.
"Did the local reed-raft builder have equipment to steam heat a plank so it could be forced into the proper position? A shipyard in nineteenth-century Maine would have been overwhelmed by the size and complexity of this job, yet Noah still supposedly found enough time to hold revivals and preach doomsday throughout the land (Segraves, pp. 87-90)."
With box shaped overall shape, why would planks have to be heated? However, a point about Durupınar, if the correct Ark.
B U T, the builder of Egyptian reed boats is a post-Flood phenomenon, which does simply not need to be taken into the equation for pre-Flood times.
"God told the patriarch to coat the ark, both inside and out, all 229,500 square feet of it, with pitch, and, in fact, this was a common practice in ancient times. But when Noah hurried to the corner hardware store, the shelf was bare, for pitch is a naturally occurring hydrocarbon similar to petroleum (Rosenfeld, p. 126), and we know that oil, tar, and coal deposits were formed when organic matter was buried and subjected to extreme pressure during the flood (Whitcomb and Morris, pp. 277-278, 434-436), so none of it existed in the prediluvian world. Morris (1976, p. 182) tries to say that the word for "pitch" merely means "covering," but not only do all other Bible dictionaries and commentaries translate it "pitch" or "bitumen," but creationist Nathan M. Meyer reveals that all the wood recovered by arkaeologists on Mt. Ararat is "saturated with pitch" (p. 85). Thus it seems that God accommodated Noah by creating an antediluvian tar pit just for the occasion, and we have another miracle."
Tar. Heat wood without air and you get tar.
Pitch means tar in Latin (pix, picis) and you called a pit of fossile fuel a "tar pit". Meaning tar and fossile pitch are sufficiently similar for the same word to be used.
"in the words of A. M. Robb, there was an "upper limit, in the region of 300 feet, on the length of the wooden ship; beyond such a length the deformation due to the differing distributions of weight and buoyancy became excessive, with consequent difficulty in maintaining the hull watertight" (p. 355)."
Those ships are made for navigation, for being powered by the wind to NOT float along with the waves. This makes for a tension between movement of the boat and movement of the waves. No parallel to a box shaped object meant to float basically like a cork.
"These ships were so long that they required diagonal iron strapping for support; they "snaked," or visibly undulated, as they passed through the waves, they leaked so badly that they had to be pumped constantly, and they were only used on short coastal hauls because they were unsafe in deep water."
First, presence or absence of metal strapping is not mentioned in the Bible. Second, this is again about ships built for navigation proper, not for just floating around like corks.
"John J. Rockwell, the designer of the first of this class, confessed that "six masters were not practical. They were too long for wood construction" (Laing, pp. 393, 403-409). Yet the ark was over 100 feet longer than the longest six-master, the 329 foot U.S.S. Wyoming, and it had to endure the most severe conditions ever encountered while transporting the most critically important cargo ever hauled."
Case for my point, since six masters from the sails on the six masts, get a propulsion relative to the waves, sth which the Ark lacked.
"So it should be clear by now why "intelligent people" somehow see a "problem" in the building of the ark."
Yeah, if on top of being intelligent, they also lack imagination, attention, or both.
Or are unwilling to use them on behalf of the Creationist side.
"[Genetic problems., after explaining Baramonology] Is this a valid argument? Without going into the details of genetics, it can be stated that every inherited trait, however small, is coded for by one or more genes, and each gene locus may have a substantial number of variants (alleles), which accounts for the great variety observed in a given population. Any specific individual, however, has at most only two alleles per locus—one from each parent."
This doesn't take into account that mutations have happened after the Flood. If all 25 species and ten genera of hedgehogs and gymnures are from one couple on the Ark, arguably the gymnures had a mutation reducing spines to thick but bendable "hairs" by changing structure or quality of keratine.
"Creationists still cling to obsolete stereotypes concerning the "three distinct families of man" descended from Noah's three sons (Custance, p. 204) and even talk candidly of the Afro-Asian "Hamites" being "possessed of a racial character concerned mainly with mundane matters" and subject to displacement by "the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites" (Henry Morris, 1977, p. 130)."
Henry Morris is probably not the best modern Creationist on this topic.
B U T the stereotype actually fits
in some degree. First, Hamites in the Biblical sense doesn't limit to, though include some, Hamites in the linguistics sense. Second, they do include Egyptians, Sumerians, Canaaneans, whose practicality is beyond doubt and whose philosophical and political acumen is indeed inferior to Persians, Greeks and Romans, as their zeal for the one true God is so to Hebrews and Arabs. Note well, Asiatics would be outside the three families and some have suggested - the Bollandists among them - East Asian peoples descend from different Noachic patriarchs.
However, Asshur's people would have shared the Sumerian outlook, while actually hailing from Shem. This of course modifies the degree to which the stereotype fits.
"In reality the ethnic complexity found throughout the world cannot be derived from the flood survivors in the few centuries since that time. The human genetic pool was reduced to five individuals—Mr. and Mrs. Noah and their daughters-in-law (the three sons don't count because they only carry combinations of the genes present in Mr. and Mrs. Noah, unless creationists are willing to admit to beneficial gene mutations)."
First, we do get a few mutations that might be neutral or even beneficial, and still exist, if they add no information, just rearrange existing one (mutations for blue eyes would be post-Flood, probably, unless inherited from Neanderthals).
Second, the three daughters in law would have included some Neanderthal and Denisovan heritage. Third, from Flood to early Empires, it was about the time from Flood to Abraham, 942 years to when he was born, and not even sure Ur existed back in 2015 BC.
Third, small groups after Babel (modern ethnic diversity seems to hail from 6000 BC in carbon dates, which is a little before Abraham's birth in Biblical dates).
"Nearly a third of human genes are polymorphic (Bodner and Cavalli-Sforzi, p. 589), and some, such as the two controlling A and B antigens, with thirty varieties (p. 589), would require substantially more people than Genesis makes available."
Mostly post-Flood mutations.
"On the other hand, it seems puzzling that such diversification should occur at all, for the originally created kinds were "good" and their "devolution" would "reduce the ability of the animal to survive in nature" (Whitcomb, 1972, p. 80); since the baramins, after all, prospered and replenished in the bleak desolation of post-diluvian Armenia, they should feel comfortable in any environment today."
Mutations would be happening fast after the Flood, as this is the time when:
- Ice age happened
- human life spans were shortened
- carbon 14 levels rose more quickly than explainable by present production rates
all of which is explainable by higher levels of cosmic radiation.
"The only clear thrust of creationist writing seems to be ridiculing the concept of species, a term usually rendered with quotation marks. We respond with White that, "if we were to give up the notion of species altogether, most discussions in such fields as ecology, ethology, population genetics, and cytogenetics (to name only a few) would simply become impossible" (p. 5)."
It so happens, the actually catalogued species in the Linnean system do not fit the definition, since there exist viable crossbreeds of more than one of those. Ligers and wholphins anyone?
"Aside from this, the creationist baramin can vary anywhere from the level of genus to order (Siegler, 1978)-or even to phylum (Ward, p. 49)—although there seems to be a vague consensus approximating it with the biological family."
Well, hedgehogs are a subfamily, with 16 species in 5 genera, and the other side adds another 9 species in another 5 genera. I can live with either hedghogs or both these and gymnures being a baramin.
"But Sciuridae (squirrels) has 281 species, and the genus Rattus (old world rats) has several hundred."
Nice. This makes for even more room on the Ark! As to Rattus I could live with even Muroidea being one baramin.
"Would creationists recognize the eighteen families of bats, with their eight-hundred-plus species, as eighteen distinct kinds, or would they make the order Chiroptera into a single bat kind?"
Probably the latter.
"Would they distinguish the nearly thirty families (two thousand species) of catfish?"
I think catfish would be more relevant for carnivore diet on the Ark than for room required on the Ark. The catfish present at the Flood didn't need the Ark for survival, and they have therefore been diverging into different species longer than land species have.
"At the other extreme are many families with but a single species, and even higher categories, such as the orders Tubulidentata (aardvarks) and Struthioniformes (ostriches) or even the phylum Placozoa, with but one representative."
Wait, aren't Ostriches, Emus and Kiwis related? I'd consider Palaeognathae as one baramin.
"What becomes of the science of taxonomy under this basis ... The theory of kinds is incoherent and confusing."
What if the confusion is on the part of taxonomy?
"Since it runs counter to all the known facts of genetics and taxonomy, the burden of proof is upon the creationists to verify it."
It runs counter to what exact facts of genetics?
How does taxonomy even have hard facts rather than present a point of view?
"Where are the fossil baramins?"
For my favourite, namely Erinaceidae, the fossil subfamilies and genera would be Silvacola, Oligoechinus, Proterix, Amphechinus, Deinogalerix and Galerix. If my hunch of this baramin having only one couple on the Ark is correct, Deinogalerix and Galerix on the gymnures side must be post-Flood extinct species.
Obviously, for completely fossil things, sauropods and theropods would be adequate baramins.
"If complete sets of kind alleles could survive twenty-four hundred or more years of radiation before the flood,"
It would rather be that alleles were created galore in the post-Flood time by mutations. Through more intense radiation. Loss of information is not a deleterous one. Take the relevant allele diversity between hedgehogs and gymnures on the side of the spikes, you will probably simply find the gymnures lack one functional gene present in hedgehogs or sth like that (on that particular front, obviouly there are other differences).
"Still no experiments are forthcoming from the ICR to test its hypothesis. It is, in fact, "armchair science" without a shred of evidence, and we are justified in rejecting it entirely and assuming that "two of every sort" means two of every species."
Armchair science doesn't mean there is no evidence, it means it deals with evidence provided by other guys. Precisely like Sherlock Holmes dealt with evidence given by visitors, before seeing it. I am taking my evidence for Erinaceidae being 25 species in two subfamilies from work done by Evolutionists and only adding "looks like a baramin to me".
Even rejecting this doesn't land with "two of every kind" meaning "two of every species". That would be ridiculous.
"Another foil used to lighten the ark is the assertion that many, in fact most, species could have survived outside the ark and, eo ipso, did. Creationists somehow do not mind that this gambit is contradicted by Scripture (Genesis 7:4, 23)."
For yet a while, and after seven days, I will rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and I will destroy every substance that I have made, from the face of the earth. 7:4
Definitely does not include fish.
And he destroyed all the substance that was upon the earth, from man even to beast, and the creeping things and fowls of the air: and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noe only remained, and they that were with him in the ark. 7:23
Are insects included in "creeping things" or does that mean snakes and lizards?
It definitely does not include fish; they are not upon earth.
"culminating in John D. Morris's spectacle of dinosaurs "somehow surviving outside" (1978, p. 201; cf. Whitcomb and Morris, pp. 68-69)."
Plesiosaurs surviving outside is feasible, since marine. For 55 Dino baramins, or most of them, the non-marine ones, no plesio or ichthy, the now usual answer is not that of Morris from 1978, this article from November 10, 2008 is in fact 30 years behind. The now usual answer is, the dinos came on board while small. Any dino egg so far found is far from the egg of Bird Roc. More like American footballs.
"Although creationists seem to think that once you're wet it's all the same, there are actually many aquatic regimes and many specialized inhabitants in each. Some fish live only in cold, clear mountain lakes; others in brackish swamps. Some depend on splashing, rocky, oxygen-rich creeks, while others, such as a freshwater dolphin, a manatee, and a thirteen-foot catfish, live only in the sluggish Amazon. In all these instances plus many more, the environment provided by the deluge waters would have no more suited these creatures than it would have the desert tortoise or the polar bear."
Different degrees of oxygenation would have been provided. Mainly, the current specialisations are post-Flood ones. Any fish now living in a swamp or a mountain lake would have lived through the Flood. This brings us to next example of a post-Flood specialisation, one where the objection has already been answered by other creationists.
"The salinity of the oceans would have been substantially affected by the flood; Whitcomb and Morris lamely address this concern by noting that some saltwater fish can survive in freshwater and vice versa and that "some individuals of each kind would be able to survive the gradual mixing of the waters and gradual change in salinities during and after the flood" (p. 387). We are asked to believe that a storm so vast that the tops of the mountains were covered in forty days was so "gradual" that fish could adapt to these minor fluctuations!"
Again you are going back to Morris instead of going to more recent Creationism, available already in 2008, on the topic.
Back when I was still in Sweden, in 2001 to 2003, I think Kent Hovind would already have, perhaps plagiarising others, spoken of salt in the seas as one argument for a young earth : salt gets added by very slight additions of salt from rivers, and never gets depleted by evaporation, unlike the water which goes in a cycle.
Sea salt loses its savour for evolutionists
by Carl Wieland | This article is from
Creation 14(1):26–27, December 1991
https://creation.com/sea-salt-loses-its-savour-for-evolutionists
Salty seas : Evidence for a young earth
by Jonathan Sarfati | This article is from
Creation 21(1):16–17, December 1998
https://creation.com/salty-seas-evidence-for-a-young-earth
This means, seas have been getting saltier and saltier and this in turn means, they were lots less salty if even any at all, in the time of the Flood.
Now, aquarium fish - though I heard this later - have been adapted to other degrees of saltiness, from freshwater to salt sea or reverse, with 7 years in a single individual being enough.
This should answer the objection about other changes of habitat I now presume over millennia from Flood to a marsh in the Amazons or to a lake in a mountain region, like Bodensee in the Alps.
Next we come to a more real challenge if you care to take it on the terms presented, mud would have crushed fish, as per this calculation:
"This volume is 1,350x 106 cubic kilometers. The volume of Phanerozoic sedimentary rock ("flood deposits") is 654 x 106 cubic kilometers (Blatt, Middleton, and Murray, p. 34). The ratio of water to rock is thus 2.06:1. Try mixing two parts water to one part sand; double or even triple the amount of the water, and then stick your pet goldfish into the muck and see how long it lives!"
This is presuming all of the solids volume was dissolved in the water for all of the Flood period, rather than small part amounts of it being dissolved in shorter periods from erosion during Flood to deposition also during Flood and no one is saying all the erosion happened on day one of the Flood or at least on day 40, when the highest mountains were covered, and that all of the deposition happened on a very late day, if not when Noah stepped out of the Ark, at least some days before the Ark landed.
I am reminded of a math pupil I had. Yeah, I have taught, and through discipline problems in Swedish and German, most classes, I got to take math before quitting the job.
The real problem involved a rectangular door and a round window. What was the wood surface to paint?
80 cm * 210 cm - ((10cm)
2 * π) would be the real formula. 16 486 cm
2.
Instead he made this formula:
80 cm * 210 cm * π - ((10cm)
2). Yielding 52 679 cm
2.
Obviously, he got LOTS more of a surface to paint than he should have. A huge elliptic door with a very small square window. An ellipse with shorter axis 160 cm and longer axis 420 cm. Since that is the mean between a circle of radius 80 cm (diametre 160) and a circle with radius 210 cm (diametre 420).
Keeping
all or even
any of the mud dissolved from the first erosion to the last deposition makes for a very grave pseudo-problem.
"Then, too, most of the world's volcanic activity, sea-floor spreading, mountain-building, and continent-splitting was supposed to have occurred at this time as well, filling the seas with additional huge volumes of rock, ash, and noxious gases. Undersea volcanoes usually decimate all life in the surrounding area (Buljan), and their extent had to be global during this terrible year. "
Mountain building apart from volcanic activity would rather be starting at the very end, by a process of folding and also of upward bulging (forgot the scientific term) and would mostly not have affected the water quality during the Flood.
Similarily spreading sea floors for deeper Oceanic basins would have happened at the end of the Flood.
Volcanic activity during the Flood is however pertinent. I used this as a reason why lava dates are inflated, see my previous post:
Creation vs. Evolution : Water Temperature, K-Ar Dating, Temperatures around the Ark, and Heating
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/02/water-temperature-k-ar-dating.html
So, volcanos are a threat to sea life ...
how dense would volcanic activities really have been then?
In fact, in Laetoli, there are
only two layers of volcanic eruption:
- 1) Ngaloba Beds,
- potassium-argon. 150.000 - 120.000 BP
- 2) Olpiro Beds,
- stratigraphy. Pleistocene.
- 3) Naibadad Beds,
- no direct result.
- 4) Ogol lavas,
- potassium-argon. 2.400.000 BP.
- 5) Upper Ndolanya Beds,
- no direct result.
- 6) Separation
- no direct result.
- 7) Lower Ndolanya Beds,
- no direct result
- 8) Upper Laetoli Beds,
- stratigraphy. Pliocene.
- 9) Lower Laetoli Beds,
- no direct result.
Creation vs. Evolution : Isn't There a Geological Column in Laetoli, and Aren't the Footprints Proof of Human Ancestors?
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2014/10/isnt-there-geological-column-in-laetoli.html
This means, there were only two eruptions during the Flood here. Unless even Ngaloba beds are post-Flood, not sure if underwater volcano eruptions would give tuff.
If we go to the Grand Canyon, we have 150 eruptions in the Uinkaret volcanic field (in the western Grand Canyon) - which perfectly explains why the shell fish formed chalks so quickly. But we don't see fish surviving everywhere, like I don't think they did in the pre-Flood seas that are now Grand Canyon. And even there, Eastern Grand Canyon presumably had no volcanic activity during the Flood, was only affected by the one in the
Uinkaret field.
But the Uniformitarian will not look at Uinkaret eruptions as relevant, since K-Ar dates for Uinkaret are more recent than Geological dates (faunal succession doctrine) for relevant other parts of Grand Canyon.
"Accurate calculations are nearly impossible, given the creationist penchant for vagueness; but by multiplying the amount of heat generated during a typical volcanic eruption (cf. Macdonald, p. 60; Bullard, p. 288) by the total volume of such material (Macdonald, pp. 350-351)—most of which would have poured out in the few months under consideration—we arrive at a mind-boggling 3.65 octillion calories. This is enough to raise the temperature of the oceans by more than 2700°C!"
I somehow think we may be again dealing with a large elliptic door with a small square window.
Radiation upwards from a surface of pure water all around the globe, has it been taken into account?
Has coldness of dissolved minerals from erosions and sedimentations been taken into account?
Can some of the volcanic material be post-Flood or pre-Flood or derived from bad calculations?
"The salmon swam to their (long-vanished) riparian breeding grounds that fall as they always had;"
How is this implied in salmon surviving? I think it more likely, they took a year off their breeding habits and had some difficulty afterwards to relocate new breeding grounds.
"sea anemones clung to their rocky perches, which were on the beach one month and the abyssal plain the next;"
As to sea anemones in Oceanic basins, I think they are lost.
"blue whales continued to strain for krill even though their baleen plates were choked with mud;"
A whale that is choking with mud would arguably be more likely to fossilise than to survive.
Cetotheriopsis lintianus,
Cetotherium priscum, Cetotherium ambiguum are three whales found in what is now Austria. As they got fossilised, they choked in mud, as they choked in mud, they didn't survive. Again, the sediment from the Flood was not all of it dissolved all of the time.
"corals, which grow in clear, shallow water, somehow grew anyway;"
Most of the mass of corals are deposited as fossil coral reefs.
For survival, some coral not dying is sufficient, and then coral reefs at present alive are usually (on creationist calculations) derivable from growth since the Flood.
"hapless bottom dwellers, their lives carefully adjusted to certain conditions of pressure and temperature, suddenly saw the former increase by more than 5,000 pounds per square inch and the latter fluctuate in who knows what directions."
Guess this disposes of the trilobites.
"Again, by some freak combination of luck, we may imagine one male and one female octopus surviving the disaster and somehow encountering each other between Japan and California to renew their species, but the only way Noah, as designated curator of the world zoo, could have guaranteed their persistence was by bringing them aboard. We must conclude, therefore, that every species of the animal kingdom had at least two members within the ark."
It so happens, the designer was not Noah, but God, and therefore God was also able to provide for a swarm of octopi to survive in the seas by dodging to where it was calm.
As to
"every species" (as opposed to every kind in baraminology) that is a repetition of total dismissal of baraminology just because of "inconsistency" as to what level would correspond to the kind, and as to
"of the animal kingdom" (meaning not just of land animals) this is denying what I just affirmed, God's providence would care sufficiently for aquatic life outside the Ark.
"They postulate that many full grown adult animal forms were left behind and that only young and thus smaller specimens were taken or—the ultimate economy—that eggs were sufficient for the preservation of the dinosaurs (John Morris, 1980, p. 66)."
Ah, Morris did say that too? Wait, John Morris, it is another Morris. Fine. 55 juvenile dino pairs.
"Most zoologists, however, would agree with Neill when he writes that "the mortality rate is usually very high among seedling plants and young animals; but once the critical juvenile stage is passed, the organism has a good chance of reaching old age" (p. 388)."
I think that for dinosaurs this is not observational, just concluded by parallel.
"In birds, for example, as many as 80 percent die before reaching maturity (Dathe)—facing everyday hazards."
What everyday hazard, if the cat kind is represented by a lynx couple (I'm here presuming pantheridae and felidae are two different kinds) which may be more interested in getting fish fed from Noah?
"Furthermore, the young of many species cannot survive without parental care and feeding (imagine two tiny unweaned kittens shivering in their stalls!),"
The young lynx need not absolutely have been unweaned, and also they are small enough for adults to be on board, as well as some lynx being specialised in a fish diet.
We need juvenile animals mostly for the large ones. Neither lynx nor birds are all that large.
"and, even if they can, the lack of a normal social environment often results in severe behavioral disturbances."
On the Ark other animals would have provided social environment, plus if dinosaurs are reptiles, these as adults very large animals who may have needed to come aboard as babies, or some of them, would perhaps not fall into this category of problem.
"The luckless animals aboard the ark were confronting the gravest challenge to their endurance ever known, and they needed to be the strongest, healthiest, and most virile representatives their species had ever produced;"
Even for the Coelurosauria or Theropoda?
"juveniles would not do."
Even for Sauropods?
"As for the dinosaur eggs, how did Noah know whether one would yield a female, the other a male—or even that both were fertile? And since no eggs require a year's gestation, he soon would have had a hoard of fragile hatchlings on his hands."
Agreed, and it says God brought the animals to the Ark, implying the dinosaurs were already hatched.
"Noah's responsibilities did not end with animals, for without plants all life would perish. Whitcomb and Morris grant that many seeds were aboard the ark in the food stores (p. 70) but quote fellow creationist Walter Lammerts to the effect that "many thousands" of plants survived either upon their own "arks" of floating debris or simply by experiencing a rather thorough watering and then sprouted again as soon as the sun came out. George Howe, too, referring to an experiment where three of five species showed germination after twenty weeks of soaking in sea water, concluded that the survival rate through dormancy would have been high (December 1968). However, two of these three sprouted only when their seed coats were scarified (cut). This presents a special problem. The abrasive force of the deluge would have easily scarified the seed coats, but this would have been too soon. The seeds would have sprouted under water and died. But after the flood waters receded and the seeds were exposed to dry land, what would guarantee their being scarified then? Howe's experiments failed to properly duplicate the conditions required by the flood model and hence his work offers no support for seed survival during the deluge."
I mean, probably you are right there are problems with George Howe's work, but this is at least way closer to a real breakthrough than your own follow up on Miller Urey!
For one, using sea water means using modern salinity of seas, not fresh water. And as per answers on fish survival, and as per seas not being saltier than compatible with a Young Earth, it was commonplace since 90's of last Millennium that seas have grown saltier, again:
Sea salt loses its savour for evolutionists
by Carl Wieland | This article is from
Creation 14(1):26–27, December 1991
https://creation.com/sea-salt-loses-its-savour-for-evolutionists
Salty seas : Evidence for a young earth
by Jonathan Sarfati | This article is from
Creation 21(1):16–17, December 1998
https://creation.com/salty-seas-evidence-for-a-young-earth
Plus, God actually has made miracles with reviving dead plants after the Flood, so plant life by miracle is not a theological problem. Tannhäuser is arguably fiction, with the Pope's staff blooming, St. Christopher's rod in Legenda Aurea may be for real, even if not mentioned in Martyrology, and
Aaron's rod in Numbers 17 is Biblical certainty.
"The vast majority of seeds which become dormant do so in order to endure cold temperatures or prolonged drought, and in the warm flood waters most would germinate immediately and then drown for lack of oxygen (cf. Villiers). The waters weren't the only thing that would bury them, however, for huge deposits of silt and lava would have been laid down as well, entombing entire forests and paving the way for coal and oil formation"
Have you seen pumice float on water? They come from lava. The "same" lava that would bury some germs would save some other ones on pumice gliding away from over heated areas. I actually omitted a paragraph divide in order to make the connexion between the two informations.
"Today the surface of the ground consists of 80 percent Phanerozoic rock and only 20 percent Precambrian ("pre-diluvian"), the latter found mostly in large shields and entirely absent in many areas (Kummel, p. 87)."
I would actually totally reject the idea of adopting a limit for beginning or end of Flood as per divisions within Geological column. If you have a Younger Dryas layer where you have carbon dates c. 12 000 BP, fine, that's post-Flood, as carbon dates for Flood are older. But below that, supposing it is even there, one need not make this assumption.
Pre-Cambrian could be antediluvian, and if sth is not "dated to" Phanerozoic by fossils so large they need a rapid burial of unusual type, its dating to Phanerozoic is not an obstacle to its being either post-Flood (as is clear with Younger Dryas) or antediluvian.
"These shields themselves would have been eroded to the bedrock by the flooding ("the vegetation would have been uprooted . . . leaving no protection at all for the exposed soils"—Whitcomb and Morris, p. 261), and in the rest of the world the few seeds that may have survived would have faced the task of pushing up a sprout through thousands of feet of mud and rock."
Obviously, in order for a seed to sprout it is advantageous if it is not covered by thousands of feet of either mud or rock. The objection here presupposes, what we do not grant, that all phanerozoic is from Flood, never earlier, never later, and also that "lower" layers now visible became so by abrasion or other erosion of "younger" layers "no longer" there.
"Floating is also unsatisfactory as a means of riding out the storm. Less than 1 percent of sermatophytes produce disseminules which drift for as long as one month, much less a year (Gunn and Dennis, p. 4). And although many debris rafts could have been torn loose during the early days of the storm, such vessels tend to break up in rough water (Zimmerman, p. 57), so they would not have lasted very long."
How much of a débris raft needs to remain in order to permit sprouting after the Flood?
"If somehow a few of them did, how would they know where to unload their precious cargo afterward?"
Like God's Providence guiding them through the Flood, as He did with the Ark?
"If we are to take the deluge seriously, we must be much more skeptical about such stories. The creationists need to soak seeds in very deep, muddy water for a year and then plant them in unconsolidated, briny silt in an unfavorable climate without insect or avian pollinators to see what happens."
Very muddy water brings us back to the idea that all that was dissolved as mud was so from day 40 of the Flood to when the waters were abating, rather than this ton of mud or more being dissolved as mud then, that other a bit later, a third a bit later still and so on.
And
"unconsolidated, briny silt" presupposes that the sea waters of the Flood had modern Oceanic salinity.
"Have their mathematicians, so skilled at calculating improbabilities for protein formation, ever determined the odds of a seed enduring the flood and then landing in the right soil and climate rather than being swept out to sea by the retreating waters or coming down in Antarctica?"
Already one thing, after the Flood came the Ice age, with less sea surface and more land surface.
But here is another one, Protein formation in abiogenesis is supposed to happen by blind chance, not by God's Providence.
"It seems that Noah needed to have not merely "many" seeds but many samples of all the seeds and spores of the 420,000-plus species of plants in order to guarantee their survival—or else we must tally up a few million more miracles of divine preservation."
Plants would typically have even more species than land animals per baramin. Plus reasons already mentioned why plant survival did not need the Ark.
Again, you calculate a more than four metres at longer axis elliptic door with a very small square window ... except the guy in my math class was only 3.196 times wrong, you are arguably wrong by far more. And you intend to get the larger problem, as it is arranging your case.
"Robert D. Barnes lists the number of living species for each phylum, ranging from the sole member of Placozoa to the 923,000 in Arthropoda (pp. 12, 85-88). Using his figures, we arrive at a total of 1,177,920 species. ... All of those creatures were known at one time, for Adam gave them all names (Genesis 2:19-20), and, since they exist today, they must have been on the ark."
- 1) Baramins, not species, giving a very much smaller number (back to rectangular door with round window as intended!)
- 2) Arthropods and fish were not included either on the Ark or in Adam's naming. At least not necessarily in it.
Highlight:
"Adam gave them all names (Genesis 2:19-20), and, since they exist today, they must have been on the ark."
Confusing Young Earth Creationism with Species Fixism? Hedgehogs and gymnures were on the ark, but whether as one or two couples, I am not sure, however, there are now 25 species of both subfamilies of the family.
"To this number, we must add the myriad of extinct prehistoric animals, which creationists assure us were alive at the time of the flood, making tracks in the Paluxy River, and which were known to Job afterward (John Morris, 1980, p. 65). This would vastly increase the numbers, since "only a tiny percentage of the animal and plant species that have ever existed are alive today" (Kear, p. 10). However, since creationists do not believe in transitional forms, we can again give them the benefit of the doubt and add to our total only the 200,000 different fossils that have been described."
Dinos would be 55 baramins, according to what I read on a creationits site. Pelycosaurs, and supposing Biarmosuchians and other Therapsids weren't genetic experiments gone bad, not too many of those either. Supposing these aren't simply counted into the 55.
"Birds are another story. There are 8,590 species of birds. Since they have already been calculated into our figure of 1,877,920 species or 3,755,840 individual animals on the ark, we need only six more pairs of each species of bird to make it come out to seven pairs. That brings our count up to a grand total of 3,858,920 animals aboard the ark—two of each species, except birds which number fourteen each."
First, not all of them are clean. Second, 8,590 species come into 41 orders and between 2 and 5 families per order, according to what I take in at a glance at the wikipedian
List of bird genera
We can now skip a few paragraphs where the authors imagine insects and parasites needed to be present two of each kind on the Ark, since it is not true.
"Was there room enough on the ark? It contained 450 x 75 x 45 = 1,518,750 cubic feet of space if it was exactly rectangular with no curve on the keel or elsewhere."
Yes, finally a correct figure!
Also, considering it was not built for navigation, but for floating and if we can exclude Durupınar, this makes a box shape most probable. No curves.
"Part of this was occupied by the quarters for Noah and his family."
Yes. Unless they simply "floated around" between the animals, like people on Medieval farms near their donkeys and oxen.
"Room had to be provided for the orderly compartmentalization of plants and seeds."
Maybe, see above for alternatives. Pumice, débris rafts.
"An immense storage area for food, fresh water, and waste was needed."
Forget storage of water, if the sea of the Flood was freshwater. Food, less than expected, if fish could be used. Waste would perhaps come to use for burning, or for letting down from the window attracting the fish.
"Also, the ark had to have corridors throughout, large enough for the passage of the bulkiest animals to their stalls when boarding and unboarding and at least large enough for the crew to pass into the most remote corners of the vessel."
Bulky beasts would have come in non-adult sizes. Corridors would have been made by beasts giving way for the men. Not very needed to have them in permanence.
"There would finally be a considerable volume lost in wood alone; the decks, larger cages, supporting beams, and so on would occupy a considerable space. The six-masted schooners had keelsons 7 feet high and 8 feet wide running the full length of the hull and often used 20 x 20 inch beams (Snow); the switch to iron construction increased cargo capacity by upwards of 20 percent (cf. Hutchins, p. 443)."
Less supporting beams needed if all is square.
"If we conservatively allow all of these requirements to consume 30 percent of the space, this leaves 1,063,125 cubic feet to be divided among the nearly 4 million animals, resulting in a mere 0.275 cubic foot per individual!"
Let's allow the 1,063,125 cubic feet, we are ditching the 4 million animals.
Plus an average between both insects and sheep is not very informative on how much room the sheep had.
"By considering which animals were clean or unclean, John [Woodmorappe] calculates that 16,000 animals were on the Ark, including dinosaurs (the young of the largest dinosaurs would do just fine). Interestingly, seabirds need not have been on the Ark, but John includes them anyway. From a body-mass analysis of all these animals, Woodmorappe finds that the average size is that of a small rat!"
I have a vision of seabirds on the ark doing the service of fishing : flying out of the window, catching the fish, and back in to serve lions and lynx and bears and wolves and other hungry carnivores.
The quote unlike the other ones around here is not "The Impossible Voyage" but
Michael J. Oard's review of John Woodmorappe's Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study. Review published in
CEN Tech. J. vol. 10, no. 3, 1996 - so I'd say that the writers of the former very well knew why they had to attack baraminology.
"All of this would have constituted a tremendous weight."
Weight - hull and cargo - can be pretty well calculated from the fact that the water line was 15 cubits up - that is half way up the overall height.
As said, how do we know the water line was 15 cubits up? Genesis 7:19-20:
And the waters prevailed beyond measure upon the earth: and all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. The water was fifteen cubits higher than the mountains which it covered.
In other words, he built the ark on the highest mountain over all earth and he knew there was water up to the water line when it started floating.
I'll now cite your figure for the volume of the Ark, and halve it to get the volume of fresh water displaced, which translates to weight.
1,518,750 cubic feet / 2 = 759,375 cubit feet = 21,503,105.4 cubic decimeters = 21,503,105.4 kg = 21,503.1 metric tons. At takeoff, when the highest mountain where the Ark was built was covered by 15 cubits of water.
"But while the figures for rail car size and capacity are cited with fair accuracy, ignored is the federal law which requires a train on a long haul to stop every twenty-eight hours, to unload the stock, to feed and water them, and to give them a five-hour rest period (Ensminger, p. 1062)."
An Ark floating on the waves would affect them very otherwise than a train journey. They would have been fed and watered on board and in sufficient space to have comfort (seen how close rails are to each other? - trains aren't much broader, but the Ark was!). And the rolling period would give a kind of hypnotic lull to all of it.
"Having drawn up a passenger list, the next order of business is to gather them all at dockside. At this point, the creationists themselves are unable to propound any sort of scenario in which Noah and his sons could perform such a feat, so they resort to the convenient dumping ground of the inexplicable: miracles."
In this case, the miracle is in the Bible, Genesis 7:13-16:
In the selfsame day Noe, and Sem, and Cham, and Japheth his sons: his wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, went into the ark: They and every beast according to its kind, and all the cattle in their kind, and every thing that moveth upon the earth according to its kind, and every fowl according to its kind, all birds, and all that fly, Went in to Noe into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein was the breath of life. And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the Lord shut him in on the outside.
They went in = God brought them. But Noah was to bring them? Yes, along on the Ark, Genesis 6:19-20:
And of every living creature of all flesh, thou shalt bring two of a sort into the ark, that they may live with thee: of the male sex, and the female. Of fowls according to their kind, and of beasts in their kind, and of every thing that creepeth on the earth according to its kind; two of every sort shall go in with thee, that they may live.
So, Noah brought them along after they went in with him.
But if you insist on naturalistic explanations, Noah and his family could have bought up a zoo and a few circuses, supposing such things existed in the pre-Flood world, however, I rather think the Ark was the first zoo and this love of seeing lots of different animals comes from our ancestors staying on the Ark for a year.
"God himself intervened by implanting in the chosen pair from each species the instinct of migration, and by this mechanism they gathered from the four corners of the world and headed for the Plains of Shinar (Whitcomb, p. 30)."
Back then, the continents would have been one continent, with four corners, still extant today but no longer forming a
perfectly contiguous Riemann rectangle (also known as non-Euclidean rectangle, also known as rectangle on a sphere).
And by looking at where we now find sea biota on land, I'd say there were lots of inland seas on the continent too.
I would myself not have placed the Ark in that plain for the reason that Noah knew the height of water from the Ark's water line, which only is relevant for the highest mountains if it rested, before take-off, on the very highest one. I could imagine, as mountains were flatter back then, that even Calvary or Mount of Olives was where the Ark was built and took off - much less high than post-Flood foldings like Himalayas or Pyrenees.
Interestingly, since an Elasmosaur was recently found in Holy Land, much of it would have been under water - either ruling out this idea or making Jerusalem in pre-Flood times an island or attached to some land further West which is now in the Mediterranean.
However, while I put the Ark elsewhere, the phrase
"the Plains of Shinar" may have echoed from Whitcombe into Evangelicals mis-citing a text where Shinar
does come in, Genesis 11:2:
And when they removed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Sennaar, and dwelt in it.
Nothing about
"plains of" Sennaar or Shinar, simply
one plain was found, and the general location is the
land of Shinar. That plain being in North-West Mesopotamia rather than South-East Mesopotamia is better compatible with it being, post-Flood, a specific feature in a land that overall was not a plain. One reason to seek archaeological Babel in Göbekli Tepe rather than in Eridu, but I digress.
Here we get a rather interesting discussion:
"A closer look reveals that a miracle is indeed called for in the gathering of the animals, but it is a much larger and more complex one than merely imparting "premonition" and migration. In the first place, a glance at Jarman's Atlas of Animal Migration shows that of all the birds, fish, and terrestrial animals whose paths are shown, only one, the common crane of southern Russia, currently migrates to the Mesopotamian Valley. Therefore, God not only programmed the animals to go to Noah's place before the flood, but afterward he deprogrammed most of them and rerouted all the rest except the common crane—a reverse miracle. Incidentally, it is noteworthy that many aquatic creatures migrate, a faculty whose origins the creationists find incomprehensible unless these creatures were also sent to the ark."
I'd rather settle for animals including birds making a miraculous migration to the Ark. Flying in to it from Four Corners, like St. Francis made a sign of the Cross after a sermon men were only allowed to overhear or watch, and the birds flew outward to the Four Directions.
"However accurate their suddenly acquired instinct, for many animals it could not have been enough to overcome the geographical barriers between them and the ark. The endemic fauna of the New World, Australia, and other remote regions, as well as animals unable to survive the Near Eastern environment, would find the journey too difficult no matter how desperately they yearned to go."
The animals that made it on the Ark would at least briefly have been able to live in the area where it was being built and a bit longer in the Ark itself.
"Flood theorists are unperturbed by such obstacles, however, for they simply gerrymander the map to give us an antediluvian world of undivided continents and a uniform, semitropical, spring-like climate, and—presto!-all the animals become evenly distributed and hence within a short stroll of the ark (Whitcomb and Morris, p. 64)."
I'd draw a pre-Flood map in another way, namely by noting where the fossils are land biota and where they are aquatic. Lienz would have been under water, since there is a fossil whale there - Miocene or Oligocene, which I take as an alias of the Flood year. Ankerschlag would have been on land or on an island - you have a Pterosaur there, Austriadactylus.
"But this resolves one question only to raise another: in such a world, where did the animals which are found today in the arctic, desert, alpine, and other specialized postdiluvian niches live? The polar bear, caribou, walrus, yak, snow leopard, and many more would suffocate in the warm tropics; many desert dwellers could not have endured the excessive humidities they would have encountered."
What would we do with that?
"Creationists would no doubt respond that these creatures evolved within their "kinds" after the flood,"
Yes, or in the case of heavy specialisation even
devolved after the Flood.
"but we have already found that concept so vague as to be meaningless."
Of course, a concept that spans anywhere between subfamily and order would be meaningless? But there is a common denominator : all three, order, family, subfamily, are higher up than genus and species. This means for most kinds there
was a diversification by mutations, genetic drift, natural selection, geographic barriers, contrary to the reductionism which here tries to reduce it to species, specifically excluding any further diversity, except perhaps subspecies. There is at least sufficient meaning in it to exclude your reduction.
"Besides, since in their chronology the ice age immediately followed the deluge and started freezing woolly mammoths, the rapidity of intrakind evolution would be far greater than any Darwinist ever dreamed possible and there could be no logical justification for continuing to rage against interkind transformation."
Rapidity is not all when it comes to "interkind". It's also a question of barriers.
"Comparative genomics shows that the mammoth genome matches 99% of the elephant genome, so some researchers aim to engineer an elephant with some mammoth genes that code for the external appearance and traits of a mammoth"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth_cloning
Mammoth Genome Project
PennState University
http://mammoth.psu.edu/mammothReads.html
The mammoth being woolly doesn't necessarily mean it couldn't survive hot temperatures (at least if watering the wool) and if they are closer related to Asian Elephants than to African ones, they could be ancestral to these ... when Noah's family spent time painting caves of "Upper Palaeolithic" they would have painted Woolly Mammoths they had known from the Ark.
