There’s another problem that I don’t see much mentioned - what about getting all those animals into the ark? How can Noah travel to collect the polar bears, the kangaroos, innumerable species of birds, and so on. And enough meat to feed the lions. You’d have to assume that they were all congregated in Mesopotamia already. Polar bears? Sounds unlikely. But afterwards they would all have to get to their present habitats. I don’t see how this is possible in a reasonable time. Humming birds? The Noah story can have roots in a real flood, but we must seek its meaning symbolically.
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There is an even bigger problem, as if any more were needed, as to what happens when the animals leave the ark. Per YEC the flood has totally destroyed the surface of the planet and covered everything with a thick layer of sediment. So right off the bat there is no soil that would support plant life. What do the herbivores eat until plant life returns? What do the carnivores eat before the herbivores have reproduced enough to survive being eaten? The only way around this is to layer on miracle after miracle.
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It wasn’t written to be taken symbolically though it has symbolic elements. It was written as mythologized history, a form used to draw meaning from an actual event.
Read in context with the rest of the Hebrew scriptures it stands out as an episode in an ongoing war where God seeks to limit the effects of incursions of rebel ‘angels’, the beings that were supposed to be Yahweh’s assistants in managing Creation but who decided to set themselves up as gods and ruin Yahweh’s plans for gathering a human family from the nations.
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And another: even before being loaded the Ark, if made of lumber, isn’t seaworthy; in fact it isn’t even lake-worthy because wood lacks the strength to maintain a floating structure that large intact – its own weight will break it. Add a load of animals and food and the problem is just magnified as wood that can’t even support its own weight has to take on more weight.
[I say “if made of lumber” because scholarship is pointing more firmly than ever at the instructions in Genesis meaning a vessel of reeds coated with pitch, and such a vessel would not suffer from the issues a wooden vessel would.]
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It is amusing to know the ark replica had to have a steel frame in the interior to support the weight.
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I think that was more about building codes than actual structure; wooden pillars could support the load but they’d be huge; I was once in a wooden lodge that had three floors and the support pillars were nearly two feet in diameter. Along the walls of the dining hall they were nearly three feet in diameter and buttressed; the dining hall ceiling was supported by arches made of wooden blocks. But to do that in a wooden ship would just make the sagging worse!
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Just remembered, there is actually a 4 story office building near here that was just built using wooden columns and floor beams instead of steel and concrete. Columns and beams are probably 3 ft across.
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Consider the consequences of the Creation we inhabit failing to match the Narrative in Genesis 1: Earth a globe with a thin crust of continents surrounded by films of water (seas) while the globe orbits the nearest star. Day 3 fails to pluck up the globe from beneath the seas and set it tidily among them while Day 4 fails to restrain the rest of the visible universe to pass across the sky but beneath the forever supply or rain placed above the sky.
YEC people make very poor physicists, indeed. Buy they also fail absurdly at reading the Word carefully - - - wait for it - - - unless G*D really is that circus clown playing tricks on the whole universe.
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The question is: how do we take it?
Rather honest to goodness miracles than pseudoscience that tries to merge the incommensurable.
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Going back to this from almost a week ago in this thread… Adam responds to @St.Roymond with this challenge:
(my own bolded emphasis added into Adam’s response above)
I’m finding more and more on these forums that extensive scriptural quotation isn’t necessarily the virtue signal that the quoters may be hoping or imagining it to be. It does signal something (to me) - but probably not what they are intending. It’s become more and more impressed on me that those whose lives and words are most shaped by scriptures are not the ones who quote it most, but rather the ones who’ve truly and deeply imbibed it - till the narrative just seeps from their pores, so-to-speak! They have no need to demonstrate skills of Bible knowledge from numerous quotations because they’re too busy letting the resulting treasure - produced fruit - just spill out. It’s like the difference between being able to recite something Jesus said (a good thing to do - don’t get me wrong) - and feasting on the bread of life (eating his body - and living into that as your life as well then.) One can do the former without experiencing the latter. And one can also be the latter without indulging in much of the former, because for these - it’s no longer about proving how right you are. Having the bread of life just robs the wind right out of the sails of all our exercises of rhetoric and virtue signalling with each other. Quotes can still serve as important remembrance, of course, but always and only toward a higher purpose now, quite beyond just venerating words on a page - sacred writ or not.
Sorry this is off-topic. And if more need be said on it, maybe it can spin off to its own topic. But at the moment this can maybe just be a singular digression.
Back to sped up radio-active decay - a very hot and interesting exchange indeed!
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I think the framing is all timbers, but codes required steel bracing at points. It is sort of telling that the front facade is photographed to minimize the concrete support structure and the huge back building attachment with all the environmental and service support equipment necessary to make it habitable for tourists. In a sense a good analogy for the AIG movement.
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All of which are easily and clearly visible on the satellite imagery on Google Maps:
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What is that extension of the keel that sticks so far above the gunwales supposed to be? Looks like adding to the text . . . again. But then so is the curved hull, and the curved prow and stern.
They skipped the pitch/tar, too.
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Probably not a bad design detail, as without a rudder, the “tail” would allow it to “weathervane” into the wind to keep side forces down and keep it from rolling over sideways in the waves. Of course, big waves would break the keel in short order as a wooden boat of that size crested them. No win situation.
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It wouldn’t take big waves, just spacing: a 1m wave at each end of that Ark with no wave in the middle would be sufficient to crack major seams; then as that 1m wave moved so one was in the middle and none at the ends, more seams would crack as the timbers flexed the other direction. Do that for a dozen repetitions and the structure starts coming apart. Make the wave a 3m one, which is not uncommon in open ocean even without a storm, and the Ark falls into pieces that then batter into each other, breaking things up into individual planks. Make it a 5m one and the Ark just cracks in two as the wave passes the middle.
So a “tail” would just serve to turn the Ark into the waves, making it break up faster.
And the round hull shape would allow the craft to roll radically, which could lead to overturning.
A physics friend did calculations and found that an Ark built with square corners all around would survive better, still assuming no rudder; apparently a big box won’t roll and won’t turn completely into the wind, so on open seas it ought to survive an order of magnitude longer than the version those YECists built – so maybe a day or two on the open sea, or around four hours in storm conditions.
This is why if you want to make the Flood account fit science an Ark made of reeds actually works better-- it would be able to flex with the waves, and if built as a box would be even less subject to rolling. I wouldn’t be surprised if a reed structure that large would be another order of magnitude more survivable than a wooden box!
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(deleted) . . .
I will respond to this without quoting…so it doesnt detract from the topic so much.
Marvin the dilemma that your response faces is that you claim to be a Christian.
where does you philosophical belief actually come from…men or the bible?
it appears that you are claiming you get your belief from looking at others and the way they live their lives!
I can tell you that approach, if it is as you appear to be suggesting, is fundamentally false,. There is not a single passage anywhere in the bible that tells us to do that. Any claim that you are following the model of Christ is deficient because you only know of the model of Christ because its recorded in the bible!
So i have to challenge that you must obtain your standard of the fruits of the spirit from reading the bible!
Firstly, Im a design and technology teacher by bachelor degree qualification.
Second, I am from a family of truck drivers and earthmovers and have spent almost my entire life around heavy machinery and trucks
Third, i ran my own small earthmoving business for 15 years
Fourth, i have spent many years in the building industry as a result of the above qualifications and skills.
The Bible says, God brought the animals to the Ark …Noah did not round them up.
The argument about Polar bears…the earth was a single continent back then (even evolution accepts a single continent model in the ancient past)
Any criticisms here regarding the construction of Ark Encounter are in all honestly so ridiculous I’m going to call them bloody stupid!!! The building codes of our modern age have very specific demands on land based buildings that must be strictly observed…please do not make an idiot of onces self by inserting stupid comments about concrete, steel beams, foundations, whether or not the building would float…these are completely irrelevant to any scientific or theological argument about that tourist attraction (its a bloody tourist attraction for goodness sake!!!)
Bills claim about the flood destroying vegetation…no one in the YEC community claims that the animals completely left the area and required no further feeding. Show me the text in the bible that says that Bill???
St Roymonds claim about lumber not being strong enough to build a boat that size…
If such a statement were actually true, how is it that Howard Hughes managed to build the largest aircraft in the world almost entirely of wood? Please note the "Spruce Goose is still one of 4 of the worlds largest aircraft to have ever flown (the A380 and An 225 and 747 are longer but less wingspan)
My intelligence is getting quite insulted by the uniformed and downright false statements of fact by individuals with zero building/construction experience on these forums making statements of fact in areas that i am intimately familiar with that are wrong in order to present theological claims that are not actually supported in the bible. If you are going to make such statements, at least ensure you provide some evidence to support your claims because there are some here reading/relying on those individuals apparent skill and knowledge who are then mislead by rot!
the difference here is that my ability to make the above comment is based on actual real world knowledge and evidence of historical fact that the Spruce Goose was built predominantly of wood and flown… There’s no hypothesis involved in that part of my claim. We can also be sure that the imense wingspan of a 70 year old design wooden aircraft supports the reality of the length of the hull of the Ark and that timber is more than strong enough for the task. The other point to remain focused upon is that the bible i think clearly illustrates that without Gods intervening hand, the Ark would not have survived the flood…it was a miracle it did survive!
2 Chronicles 32:30
It was Hezekiah who blocked the upper outlet of the Gihon spring and channeled the water down to the west side of the City of David.
Radiometric dating is actually confirmed in the Bible, as C14 and uranium-thorium dating independently yield results in agreement with the time of Hezekiah’s reign.
Carbon dating confirms origins of biblical tunnel
Frumkin and colleagues measured the relative masses of the carbon isotopes within the plaster using an accelerator mass spectrometer at Oxford University. They calculated that the material in the plaster dates from between about 800 to 510 BC.
The geologists then dated stalactite material – known to have formed after the tunnel was built – from the ceiling of the tunnel. They used uranium-thorium dating by thermal ionization mass spectrometery at the Open University in the UK. This method is based on the detection of both the parent (uranium-234) and daughter (thorium-230) products of decay by the emission of an alpha-particle…
Frumkin and colleagues found that the stalactites were more than 2300 years old.
What is somewhat telling is that this was from a paper published in the journal Nature, and was reported broadly in secular news sites. As this was a noteworthy validation of a Biblical record, one would have expected that apologetic sites would have been eager to publicize the result to their followers, but instead crickets. Evidently, if evidence for Biblical history is tied to evidence for the reliability of radiometric dating, for YEC the less said the better.
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