Noah’s Farce
How basic observations of the natural world refute the Ark myth.
To begin, it has to be said that there is no evidence what so ever that the christian god exists. Therefore, any notions or refutations about how ‘god can make all things possible’ is right out. For one, an all powerful deity couldn’t logically manufacture something so heavy even he/she/it is unable to move it, so clearly all things are not possible in this respect.
Second, if anyone could provide evidence of an all-powerful deity of the variety christians support, it would have happened by now and I wouldn’t be writing this essay. As an aside, I can’t fathom why society keeps deferring to people who make the claim god exists when they’ve added nothing to the equation, in the way of proof, for countless generations. To ask a question, would you trust the competency of a scientist who ran the same experiment for centuries, expecting a differing result each time from the same parameters?
Didn’t think so.
On to the Noah myth, or rather the logical deconstruction of the same.
For starters, no one knows what the fuck gopher wood is/was so it’s impossible to make a claim of fact or fiction on that one. What can be said is that wood rots over time, even it it’s been specially treated for exterior applications, as anyone who’s kept a brush/wood pile for any length of time will tell you. So there’s no way in hell (or Sheol, as the Torah might say) they would have been able to maintain a seaworthy vessel of the wooden variety for the 80 plus years the myth says it took to create the Ark, absent some super secret miracle sealant we’ve yet to rediscover.
For that matter, no one knows exactly what a ‘cubit’ is, so it’s impossible to accurately state just how big the ship would have been were it a real construct. What can be said is that the standard assumption of the length of a cubit, being recognized as the length from a middle finger to the elbow, is somewhere between 17 and 22 inches. At least that’s what I’ve read before. I’ll use the length of my own arm as a cubit base just to simplify matters, which is roughly 18 inches.
The stated dimensions of the Ark are 300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits, which means the dimensions factor as 450 feet long by 75 feet wide by 45 feet tall. That’s smaller than the average size of an American football stadium by my understanding. And as most football stadiums can, at the most, hold only tens of thousands of people in close quarters (maybe 100,000), it’s clearly impossible that the Ark as stated would have had the room to safely hold samples of the multitude of animals extant on the planet thousands of years ago, sufficient to breed for the diversity of species we now enjoy; to say nothing of the amount of food it would take to to feed them for even the short flood duration purported in the story. Ever kept a stable of horses for a month or two? They eat a lot, don’t they?
As for the volume of water, the myth states that it covered the entire surface of the earth, even to the highest mountain. Given that the highest peaks on the planet reach almost to space, one has to call bullshit here because anyone who has watched a documentary about mountain climbing will know it gets awfully fucking cold at those elevations, and the air gets really thin, such that supplemental oxygen is required to stay alive. It would have been really difficult for anything to survive at that elevation. Of course, the myth states (in the KJV at least) that the waters ‘prevailed’ fifteen cubits upward, so if we’re to take that as fact, the flood level was actually no greater than half that of the Ark itself, at least as described, hardly sufficient to cover most hills. What’s more, the diversity of aquatic life would never have been sustained because mixing fresh water and salt water kills a whole fuck-ton of species we now depend on for food…so figure that one out.
Aside from that, where the fuck did that much water go when the whole thing was said and done? It wouldn’t have just magically floated off into space because it would have frozen and likely left our planet with a ring system; and since no such thing has been recorded in history, it’s safe to assume there never was such an event. Maybe there were a lot of earthquakes and it got sucked back down into the ground…? Doubtful, considering the amount of tectonic stress that would have been needed to open fissures deep enough to swallow that volume of water in such a short amount of time, if we take the story as read. Our planet has several underwater earthquakes in a given calendar year as it is and the sea levels haven’t dipped in any significant measure, have they…?
Speaking purely in terms of nautical engineering, a wooden ship of this size is impossible without some form of metal support structure to hold it together. Most people probably assume that you build a boat, put it water and bob’s your uncle, but that’s not where the story ends. Tidal stress, among other things, gets placed on any given ship as it remains in the water. The larger the ship the more it twists and bends with the varied energy it receives from waves, big or small. Without metal structural reinforcement, the damned thing would snap in half in no time flat. And since the myth only states a wooden ship covered in pitch was built, it’s safe to assume no metal was used in the construction as read. Feel free to read a more thorough breakdown here if you find my protestations unconvincing.
Ok, so now the flood is done, waters gone by-by, and every thing is dead that Don God-dy wanted offed. If we take the narrative as one lasting roughly a year (which may or may not add up depending on how you do the maths by the various numbers laid out in the story) how the hell did anything edible grow back in such a short time after the planet was saturated with that much water, sufficient to sustain all the animals purported to have been carried in the Ark, to say nothing of the few humans remaining (more on them in a moment)?
Ever kept a garden in your backyard? Ever managed to feed yourself all year round with just the takings from that garden? No…because crops take time to grow in abundance and the amount of food needed to sustain one person for a year is FUCKING IMMENSE. At a cup a day, bare minimum, you’d need well over half a ton of uncooked rice alone and there’s no way your average backyard garden could produce a crop that big. Sufficed to say, You can’t plant corn on Tuesday and expect dinner on Saturday; so obviously they would have starved within months, provided they resorted to snacking on the animals until harvest time, putting the kibosh on the whole plan to repopulate all those species.
And then we come to the human population. By all accounts, you would need a breeding population of hundreds, at the very least, to ensure a viable species. Unless there were a hell of a lot more people on that damned boat than what the story alludes to, there’s no way we came to be the species we are given the limited numbers the myth claims were available to restart human civilization. It’s basic genetics. A limited group of people, no bigger than a small tribe, would have never been able to repopulate the earth as the story claims.
The Noah story is not original, as academics have noted, nor is it compelling. At the end of the day, the Ark story is a foundation myth, and not a very good one, absent Russell Crowe in the main role. Though I will say his recent performance as Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder left something to be desired, so it’s debatable whether or not his turn as Noah should be lauded. There are better (re)creation myths from other ancient cultures. What’s more, there are better, more believable flood myths to be found in the very same region from which we derived Noah and his whack(y) adventures.
Why we continue to allow the stories of the christian bible to be placed on a pedestal, or deferred to as supremely important, is beyond comprehension; especially when better movies could be made about ancient Chinese floods or the Story of Ziusudra, if one wants a more ancient, more original rendition of the Noah myth.
It’s time we internalized a more rational view of reality and left childish assumptions by the wayside. There are more important things to worry about in the here and now. If we’re not careful, we’ll be telling our own extinction story very soon and it wont matter in the grand scheme of things what were the comfortable lies we told ourselves in order to keep sane as the years of our cosmically insignificant lives passed. As the bible says, ‘When I became a man, I put away childish things.’
Adieu Mes Amies.
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