Introduction

By far the single most incredulous story in the bible is the tale of a flood at the time of the fictional character named noah. Even though it is wrong on every conceivable level, there are still religious people who go to extraordinary lengths to try and save face by mounting arguments to support the events described in the religious texts. There is a fair bit of misinformation concerning the events, so a refresher of genesis chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9 is in order (see recap, below). For the complete text, please see the dissection of those chapters at the book of genesis (a page on this web site).

Note that the story of noah is in the first book of the pentateuch and therefore is common to three of the world’s most popular religions: Christianity, Islam and Judaism. That’s about 4.5 billion people today who can’t run away from the story of noah and his flood.

Many of the other religious stories are told in numerous places however the flood story is told in only one place (as specified above). And it’s short. That’s it; there are no other bits of information or detail to consider elsewhere. That hasn’t stopped many people adding a lot to the story, so why have so many things been added (guessed) about the flood story? Because nothing about the story makes the slightest sense, so a great deal has to be invented and added to keep the bible literalists from self-detonating.

A word about verified authorship of the flood myth: there isn’t any. The suggestion that moses wrote genesis is only a face-saving lie, but even if he did, he wasn’t going to “exist” for another millennium, so what is the lineage of the writings about the flood? Who did god dictate the events to so that such detail (e.g. the exact size of the boat) would be recorded? Remember that genesis was not going to be written for about 1,800 years (give or take a few hundred years) after the flood, so that’s an awfully long time for accurate details to be handed from one generation to the next.

As usual on these pages, no attempt has been made to capitalize words describing fictitious characters and places.

Summary of the fable

Somewhere between 2,300 BCE and 2,350 BCE god checked in with his beloved creation and was not at all happy with what he saw: “god saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (genesis 6:5). Going straight to the end game, god said “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them” (genesis 6:7). Luckily for us, there was one man who was “perfect in his generations, and noah walked with god” (genesis 6:9). It’s not stated if they also were “perfect”, but noah had a wife and three sons: shem, ham, and japheth, and each of them had a wife. Keep in mind that those total eight people – because that’s going to be important later.

To destroy all the “evil” in the world, god decided to send a great flood, and he gave noah the plans to build an ark out of gopher wood and pitch: “The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits” (genesis 6:15). It also was to have one window and one door. Then god instructed moses that two of every “kind” of animal (male and female) “shall come unto thee” to be safely stored in the ark, and that noah should “take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them” (genesis 6:21).

At the age of 500 noah started building the ark. Based on the timeline documented in genesis chapter 5, noah turned 600 exactly 1,656 years after adam was born – in the year 2,344 BCE (if the world is assumed to have been created in the year 4,000 BCE). According to chapter 6 of genesis, the flood happened when noah was 600.

For some reason god then adjusted his own plan (instead of just using animal pairs): “Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens” (genesis 7:2) and “Of fowls also of the air by sevens” (genesis 7:3). But even that change gets muddled in a later writing: “There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah” (genesis 7:9) – with no mention of the extra animals of some species.

For what follows, the following timeline can be used:

And then things started to happen: “And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark” (genesis 7:7) and “And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth” (genesis 7:10). However there is a contradiction shortly after via: “In the six hundredth year of noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights. In the selfsame day entered noah, and shem, and ham, and japheth, the sons of noah, and noah’s wife, and the the three wives of his somes with them, into the ark;” (genesis 7:11-13). So did noah enter the ark on the day the rain started or did he enter seven days before the rain started? The same chapter gives both versions. The following assumes the version where noah entered the ark and waited seven days before the rain started. In other words, the flood started on day 8 (on the 10th day of the second month).

Regardless, there was no way of stopping god’s plan of vengeance because “the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered” (genesis 7:19-20). Fifteen cubits is about 7.5 metres (25 feet).

Sadly for those not up to the level of goodness of the shem’s, ham’s and japheth’s of that world, genocide was then achieved: “And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died” (genesis 7:21-22).

The turning point was then reached: “And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days” (genesis 7:24). “The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained;” (genesis 8:2). “And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated” (genesis 8:3).

However “And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat” (genesis 8:4) is a problem because it seems to contradict genesis 7:24. That’s because the ark supposedly touching land happened well before the 150 days (stated in 7:24) were completed, and therefore the waters had not yet started to decrease to lower the ark so that it could touch land. The author(s) of 8:4 should have said something like “rested in the ninth month” (instead of “seventh month”). Or perhaps the authors are trying to have us believe that a boat (with no documented propulsion or steering) happened to just scrape the top of a submerged mountain and then simply stop there (“rested” would seem to be too calm a word to describe the act of crashing into a submerged mountain)?

“And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen” (genesis 8:5).

Then comes the conclusion of the plan: “And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth. Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground; But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark. And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark; And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth. And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove; which returned not again unto him any more. And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry. And in the second month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, was the earth dried” (genesis 8:6-14). It’s not stated what the practical difference is between the ground being dry, and almost two months later, the earth being dry?

As an aside, and based on the text alone, the various rates of receding water are a major problem. There are about 75 days (over ten weeks) from when the waters stopped prevailing on the Earth to when the dove was first released on its unsuccessful mission to find rest for its feet. However the bible states that from when the dove first returned to when the “ground was dry”, only about 49 days passed. It’s incredulous to believe that thousands and thousands of feet of water (at the very least) dissipated (to where?) to leave dry ground in about seven weeks – especially when the previous ten weeks did next to nothing to lower the water levels.

The noah clan then emerged from the ark, as did all of the animals. By way of thanks, noah then “took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar” (genesis 8:20). Cryptically, “the lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done” (genesis 8:21).

The green light is then given to the survivors as god “said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (genesis 9:1), and in terms of food, god gave wide-ranging permission when he said “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things” (genesis 9:3). To reassure noah, god then states “I do set my bow (rainbow) in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh” (genesis 9:13-15).

Then follows a bizarre episode during which noah gets drunk and naked, falls asleep, is seen by his son ham, but is covered by his two other sons. For some reason noah then awoke and got upset at ham and “he said, cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (genesis 9:27). It’s for this reason, and this reason alone, that ham is earmarked as the father of the despised Canaan.

The last that we hear about noah is that he lived for another 350 years – dying at the age of 950.

Population

Population – Numbers

The bible doesn’t state how many people were alive just prior to the flood, but it is possible to make calculations (link to an external site) based on known human reproduction behavior and the information contained in genesis about the people and children who were descended from adam and eve. One such detailed study has determined that the population easily could have been anywhere from 5 billion to 17 billion, with a reasonable estimate being 10 billion. Those numbers are upper estimates because they don’t take into account catastrophic events such as wars, disease and natural disasters, all of which would have reduced the base numbers from which exponential population growth would have occurred.

Population – Good v. Evil

However even if the population is assumed to have been one billion, there are problems to consider. Is it really likely that noah was the only person out of one billion who was pure and not evil or wicked in any way? Really, there was not a single other person out of one thousand million people who had equal moral virtues to noah? That is fantastically unlikely, especially since the one snippet about noah’s character that we do know is that he was happy to get drunk and fall asleep naked in situations where family members could see him. That doesn’t seem like a solid basis for being that one-in-a-billion candidate.

And what was the definition of “evil” and “wicked” prior to the flood? Remember that the ten commandments were not going to be handed down to moses for another 1,000 years, so what guidelines did the pre-flood people have as to how not to be evil and wicked? And why did god not try to work with his creation to influence and adapt their behavior? Why just show up one day and announce that he was going to wipe out all but eight of his beloved creation? How many out of the billion people would have basically been good if they’d only just had a kick up the pants (by the omniscient creator of the universe) to get them back on the straight and narrow? How many of the people were really pretty good, with only a transgression or two (which they regretted) in their past? There would have to be some like that out of a billion, surely?

How many of the billion were babies or toddlers and therefore not have had a chance to sin (however that was to be defined)? If the reason newly-born babies had to die was because they had the capacity to sin and were basically vessels of future evil, then they were exactly the same as noah and his family in that regard. So their free will was taken away? There must have been at least tens of thousands of babies, so the next time your religious instructor off-handedly talks about the sinners being wiped away by the flood, perhaps raise your hand and ask what sensation does a baby experience when their lungs fill with water as they drown?

And what about the other seven people besides noah? There’s no suggestion that they were perfect. Were they also as “pure” as noah? Perhaps there were other people out of the billion or so who were as “pure” as noah’s wife, their sons and their wives? At least those other people would have provided more genetic diversity – something the men who wrote the bible knew nothing about, as we shall see. If the rest of the noah clan weren’t technically perfect (and the bible states that noah was the only perfect person), would they risk introducing imperfection back into the human race – tending to defeat the whole purpose of the flood exercise? And if those eight were somehow perfect, what are the odds of that closely-related clan being the only ones out of a billion people to be perfect? There’s a reason the text is silent on the lives of noah’s kiddies and their wives.

Population – Growth rate

To humor the Young-Earth Creationists (YEC), starting with noah’s offspring after the flood, it would be necessary to double the population every 150 years to arrive at the seven billion people we have on Earth today. That sounds reasonable (although it doesn’t take into account the negative impact of things like wars, famines, plagues and natural disasters) until you consider how few people would have existed in the earlier times following the flood. For example, 500 years after the flood there would have been about 80 people, and after 1,000 years there would have been about 900 people, and after 1,500 years there would have been just over 8,000 people alive. The problem therefore is that there simply could not have been enough people alive at any of those times to support the civilizations and constructions of buildings that we know existed.

For example, consider the Pyramid of Khendjer in Egypt (Wikipedia link). It is now destroyed, but it was over 37 m tall and comprised a volume of over 34,000 cubic meters. It was built in 1,760 BCE as a burial chamber for the 13th dynasty pharaoh Khendjer. That’s about 600 years after the time the flood was supposed to have happened, and if the YEC population growth modeling is assumed then there were only about 130 people on Earth at that time; and those people had to be spread over multiple locations to repopulate the people of Earth as we know it today. That would mean that there could only have been a few dozen people living in Egypt to have worked on the stone excavation to build the Pyramid of Khendjer. The fact that is impossible doesn’t seem to bother the people who persist with the belief that noah’s clan repopulated the Earth. And it actually gets much worse because there were many other pyramids (Wikipedia link) being built in Egypt around the same era. So, according to YEC, you’ve really only got a handful of people successfully building a 34,000-cubic-metre pyramid; and somehow that fact doesn’t ever cause them to change their mind about their flood “theory”.

To counter this problem, the YEC have proffered the idea that the population growth was much faster in the hundreds of years following the flood and then slowed down to the more reasonable levels that we might expect today. Yes, crazy, isn’t it? That “theory” is stated without a shred of evidence, and is another example of the intellectual dishonesty perpetrated by those wishing to start with an end goal and then alter the facts to achieve that goal.

Boating

The scale of noah’s ark introduces significant problems. Nobody knows exactly how long the biblical cubit was, except that it is deemed to be the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. An approximate reasonable value is 45 cm (18 inches). That means that the ark would have been about 135 m long by 22.5 m wide by 13.5 m tall (148 by 25 by 15 yards). Based on different definitions of the cubit, some believe it to be about 10% larger again.

The largest real “wooden” ship ever built (completed in 1909) was the schooner Wyoming which had a deck of length 110 meters (360 feet). It was a bit longer (140 m) because it had pointy bits at each end, but they weren’t part of the hull structure. They say “wooden” but it had 90 diagonal iron cross-bracing members on each side, and even with them the ship “tended to flex in heavy seas, which would cause the long planks to twist and buckle, thereby allowing sea water to intrude into the hold. Wyoming had to use pumps to keep her hold relatively free of water. In March 1924, she foundered in heavy seas and sank with the loss of all hands”. The ark that god specified had a hull which was at least a third longer and at least half as wide again as the Wyoming – with no iron cross-bracing members.

The bible is clear that the ark was to be made from gopher wood and pitch. Surprisingly, no one is sure what gopher wood was, although the best guess is that cypress was used. Gopher wood is not mentioned anywhere else in the bible. Today, pitch is a byproduct of the petroleum industry, however in ancient times, a primitive form of pitch was produced from the resin collected from (some) trees. Unfortunately, it is a painfully slow process to collect resin and then to heat it in a way that produces pitch, so the process that noah must have gone through to collect enough pitch to attempt to waterproof an ark over 130 meters long is mind boggling. And of course, if much more modern waterproofing techniques failed for the Wyoming, there’s no reasonable way to expect a much larger vessel to have been made waterproof with home-made tree-resin pitch about 4,200 years earlier. It must also be remembered that noah did not have pumps to evacuate the water that must have entered the ark as its 130 meter length twisted and buckled in the turbulent waters of a catastrophic flood. Perhaps he got his clan to use buckets to expel the collected water through the one window at the top of the ark?

Steel was not going to be invented for 1,000 years after the time of the supposed flood, so all noah might have had access to is iron. The bible does not mention anything about noah or his clan having the slightest clue about how to mine iron ore, nor how to smelt and fashion it into tools, nails or other support structures. The bible does not mention that metal was used in any part of the construction of the ark. The problem with using iron is that it rusts, especially when it is exposed to a salty environment because where salt is present, electrochemical corrosion occurs, and a protective oxide film does not form on the iron, thus the corrosion (buildup of rust) continues unchecked. Rusted metal becomes less effective when used as bracing and joinery.

And that leads to a substantial problem with the ark story, namely that boat-building is a complicated and specialized task, and the bible does not claim that noah and his clan had any boat-building experience. And noah was no spring chicken because he was (supposedly) 600 years old when he was given the task of building an ark that is considered to comprise about one million meters (3,300,000 feet) of board timber. So an inexperienced 600-year-old is expected to build the largest wooden boat that will ever exist, and a boat that is supposed to keep safe the remains of the human race and all the animals in the world during a year-long tempestuous flood? The religious will dismiss this concern by saying that obviously god assisted noah all the way along. The problem with that theory is that it is a complete guess. The bible actually states the opposite: “Thus did noah; according to all that god commanded him, so did he.” (genesis 6:22). Note “commanded”? It does not say “Thus did noah with god’s assistance …”. If you are going to take the bible literally, then there’s no evidence that god built any part of the ark for noah. There’s also no evidence that noah was assisted in the construction (e.g. by all those expert ship builders around at that time).

As an aside, it’s interesting to note that the story of the ark reinforces the observation that mankind cannot build what god can (the universe, stars, planets, mountains, seas, etc.), and god never builds what mankind can (arks, tabernacles, clothing for holy men, boats, etc.). This must really bug the religiously-minded because it would have saved a lot of awkward questions if god had said “Hey, noah, get the missus, your kiddies and their squeezes together and hop onto that ark over there that I’ve just built and populated with animals – you’re all having a sea change for a year”.

It may surprise the reader to learn that three attempts (Wikipedia link) at building life-sized arks have been made: one in the US, one in the Netherlands, and one in Hong Kong. It probably won’t surprise the reader to find out that not one of those replicas is seaworthy. The one in the Netherlands is unique in that it does sit on the water, but only “floats” because it rests on top of a hidden floating steel platform made from 21 LASH barges. It’s revealing that those attempts to “prove” the biblical story actually achieve the opposite. If modern-day building techniques, tools and machinery (e.g. using electricity and diesel) cannot construct a full-sized seaworthy replica, then it is not possible to do so. Certainly an inexperienced 600-year-old man could not have achieved it in about 2,350 BCE. You can bet your bottom dollar that if the people who attempted to build full-sized replicas could have built a version that floated (after going to all the time, trouble and expense of undertaking the project), then they would have gone the extra mile and achieved seaworthiness. They didn’t because it is beyond the abilities of timber-based construction. The men who invented the religious texts didn’t realize that.

Global or Local?

There are two main theories people consider when it comes to the scale of the flood: global or local. The “global” theory comes about because of a literal reading of the bible: “the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered” (genesis 7:19-20). This passage must really annoy religious literalists because it has led to the need to concoct the most ridiculously elaborate set of constructs and additions to support a very simple set of religious verses. The problems come about for literalists (almost always young-Earth creationists) because every single piece of actual evidence that has been uncovered shows a young Earth followed by a resetting global flood, to be impossible. To “overcome” the impossible, more and more elaborate guess-based “facts” have to be invented, which, as the following will document, they have tried to do. The other reason for going with a global flood is because of the moral narrative of the story: the need to wipe away all the “evil” and “wickedness” in the world. If the flood was a local event then the literalists immediately run into a problem of explaining the cultures around the world that didn’t get caught up in the downpour – hence allowing their “wickedness” to continue.

Speaking of local, there are two main schools of thought: the flood covered the entire known lands of the Middle East or that it was a local flood, say just in the lands of the Tigris-Euphrates river system (Wikipedia link) in Syria and Iraq. The “local” theory comes about because much more reasonable minds (than owned by YEC literalists) realize the inherent problems with “global” theories and try to dodge the most awkward questions by reigning in the claims made in the texts. However those believing in local theories still have problems they need to explain.

There is a third option which combines both global and local concepts, but that will be addressed later on this page.

If the flood was local, then how is that reconciled with god proclaiming (via rainbows) never to send another flood to wipe people out? Millions of people have been killed over the previous 4,500 years by wide-scale flooding.

The divergence in theories is mentioned because much of what follows applies to one or the other camps, and sometimes to both, with varying degrees. Feel free to consider the points presented that are relevant to your beliefs – while obviously continuing to believe that the other side is nuts.

Actual History

The idea that the flood was designed as a tool to wipe out all the evil in the world must have come as a surprise to other civilizations who were alive at the time suggested for noah – although not necessarily in his part of the world.

A 2011 genetic study of the Aboriginal Australians determined that their population split off from other Eurasians between 62,000 and 75,000 years ago, so it might come as a shock to YEC that the Aboriginals have no cultural memory of being wiped out about 4,500 years ago. It’s also not possible that they developed a 75,000-year DNA link to Eurasians in only the few hundred years that they have been exposed to the early English (and possibly Dutch) explorers.

Then there are the cultures who have calendars that predate the supposed flood. At the time of the flood, the Chinese were in about the 350th year of their calendar, the Egyptians were in the 650th year of their calendar, and amazingly, the Yazidis were in the 2,400th year of their calendar. None of them recorded the end of their civilizations by flooding. Interestingly, the Yazidis are a people based slap-bang in the middle of the biblical events because their origins are in the region of modern day Iraq. Also interesting is the “impact” the so-called flood had on ancient Egypt because it is supposed to have happened at the end of their fifth or beginning of their sixth dynasties. For some reason they failed to notice it. This is a fact that annoys YEC and they take great pains to ignore history rather than to accept that it makes a mockery of their flood fairy tale.

In fact, there were five major civilizations that were known to be around at the time of the “flood”, at approximately 2,350 BCE (the following links are to Wikipedia articles):

• Ancient Egypt. 3,150 to 332 BCE. At the time of the “flood”, the Old Kingdom (2,700 to 2,200 BCE) was in full swing, marked by pyramid building and centralized pharonic rule.
• Indus Valley Civilization (Harappan). 3,300 to 1,300 BCE. At its peak, this vast civilization spanned present-day Pakistan and Northwest India, featuring advanced cities like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa with sophisticated urban planning and drainage systems.
• Mesopotamia. 10,000 to 539 BCE. The region (modern Iraq) was home to Sumerian city-states and the burgeoning Akkadian Empire, known for early writing (cuneiform) and complex societies.
• Neolithic China. 8,500 to 1,400 BCE. They were developing complex cultures like the Longshan and Liangzhu, and were laying foundations for later dynasties.
• Caral-Supe Civilization (Norte Chico) in Peru. 3,500 to 1,800 BCE. One of the earliest complex societies in the Americas, focusing on maritime resources and monumental architecture.

Unlike the characters and events in the various religious texts, we have a great deal of evidence proving the above civilizations. Not a single one of them made any mention of being wiped out by a global flood. So fundies, you get to choose which you would like to explain:

• If it was a global flood, why didn’t the above civilizations record a single thing about that flood, let alone be wiped out by it?
• If it was a local flood (to the location of noah), then how come the text says the flood was to wipe away all the wickedness in the world? Or can you come up with some sort of explanation as to why the people of other civilizations were not in any way wicked? And if it was a “local” devastating event, then it should have been recorded (outside of the religious texts) in some part of Mesopotamia – yet it wasn’t.

We’re waiting…

Geology

Geological Column

There’s been an attempt made by creationists to “explain” the world around us as being the result of what happened in, and shortly after the year-long flood. The biggest of those issues is the problem explaining the orderly laying down of fossils in the geological record. The geological record is a collection of about 116 main layers defined in the Chronostratigraphic Chart (link to a Google Sheet document) – which is also known as the Geological Column.

The chart goes back about 4 billion years (approaching the age of the Earth) and defines the orderly depositing of layers that are confirmed via evidence from numerous sites around the world. The boundaries between the layers are often defined by the first appearance of a certain species, for example a certain trilobite or conodont (eel-like creature). Defining that first-appearance marker means that the species will never be found lower down in the geological column.

Geology v. Hydrostatic Sorting

Young-Earth creationists (YEC) believe in something called hydrostatic sorting. They claim that the geological layers being discovered were laid down by the action of flood waters during the year-long flood. [It’s difficult to type while laughing, so I’m sorry if there are a few typos in the next bit.]

For hydrostatic sorting to work, YEC claim that the heavier animals (like the big dinosaurs) sank the quickest and therefore are at, or near the bottom of the layers (they aren’t, because there are about 65 defined layers below the oldest dinosaurs). If that’s the case, why are all of the trilobites below all of the dinosaurs in the layers? Trilobites lived from about 520 to 250 million years ago whereas dinosaurs lived from 240 to 66 million years ago. Dinosaurs and trilobites did not exist at the same time. The biggest trilobites were about 50 cm (20 inches) in length, but most were much smaller (some down to only millimetres in size). So the question becomes, if hydrostatic sorting works, how come all of the trilobite fossils are below all of the dinosaur fossils? All trilobites are much lighter than a Tyrannosaurus Rex (12.3 m or 40 ft in length) so if hydrostatic sorting is valid, why hasn’t there been found at least one trilobite in a layer above one of the T-Rex fossils? (There hasn’t.)

And it’s not just trilobites and dinosaurs because studies have shown that animals tend to evolve toward becoming larger over time. The evidence uncovered in the geological layers actually shows the exact opposite of what the hydrostatic-sorting “model” predicts. Some of the smallest organisms are defined in the very oldest of layers. Consider the multicellular filaments of Bangiomorpha pubescens (a type of red algae) which was the first taxonomically resolved eukaryote (cells having a nucleus enclosed within membranes). It was the first organism that exhibited sexual reproduction and microfossils have been discovered in the layer defining the Ectasian period, which existed at least 1.2 billion years ago. If hydrostatic sorting was a suitable model to explain what we see today, how come such a microfossil is buried 60 layers below the fossils of the dinosaurs? Shouldn’t all of those microfossils have floated above the sinking dinosaurs and ended up being deposited in the 24 main layers above the last dinosaurs?

And yet YEC will still try to teach nonsense concepts such as the flood laying down the geological record to children. Shame on them.

Genetics

Another elephant in the corner of the ark is that eight people (noah, three sons, and four wives) could not possibly have restarted the human race (as we know it today) in about 4,350 years – or in any amount of years to be honest. As already mentioned, the genetic bottleneck and subsequent negative health effects on all people that would have occurred by restarting the human race from only a handful of people would be obvious today; and they aren’t. On the contrary, science has determined a much better “origin” for all the people alive today, and they’ve done that not by interpreting the words of ignorant iron-age men, but by scientifically analyzing the DNA of a large number of people.

Mitochondrial Eve (link to Wikipedia) is defined as the most recent woman from whom all living humans descended in an unbroken line purely through their mothers and through the mothers of those mothers – back until all lines converge on one woman. By studying the DNA from a vast range of modern humans, an estimate of the generations required to arrive at a single woman ancestor can be made, and it turns out to be somewhere about 155,000 years ago. Note that the study does not identify a particular person who lived back then, for example we don’t have the fossil remains of that “Eve”, but we do know that she must have existed. The study also doesn’t mean that she was the first human female because we know that anatomically-modern humans existed as far back as at least 300,000 years. It simply means that she was lucky enough to have her female descendants form an unbroken line all the way forward to every person alive today. In other words, there is no person alive today (or not one that we’ve discovered) who doesn’t have a signature from her DNA.

An equivalent exists for the most recent common male ancestor of all living people, and he is called Y-chromosomal Adam (Wikipedia link). Again, he is not a known person, rather he is a person who must have existed somewhere between 200,000 to 300,000 years ago to provide genetic material that has been handed down to all modern humans. There is no suggestion that this “Adam” and this “Eve” knew each other (and based on the different periods in which they lived, they couldn’t have).

The ages of these two people can (and does) get pushed back if new evidence is uncovered e.g. the discovery of a previously unknown Y-chromosomal haplogroup. That’s fine because that’s just science being science, i.e. being evidence based rather than superstition based. The men who wrote the bible were 2,500 years short of being molecular scientists (and it shows) and therefore failed to incorporate DNA evidence in their writings. Truth be told, it’s DNA evidence that will cause religion to be consigned eventually to the dustbin of history. Just as no one today takes the stories around zeus or thor seriously, it won’t be too long before no one takes the current religions seriously. Thank goodness that process is well under way.

But, since religion hasn’t died yet, the religious have to try their best to hang onto the superstitious fairy tales invented 2,500 years ago, and when it comes to noah’s ark, the incomprehensible story is that eight people could have repopulated the Earth in the previous 4,500 years. There’s no way of getting around the issue, but that would require an awful lot of incest. When it comes to the biblical adam and eve, the usual religious story is that they were genetically “perfect” and therefore incest wouldn’t have had the negative effects we understand would have happened. The same argument can’t apply to noah’s clan because they were many generations removed from adam and eve and were therefore the result of the sin of eating fruit salad in the garden of eden – and of course all the “sin” genetically accumulated in the intervening generations.

YEC sometimes point to the mitochondrial DNA chart and identify three major branchings – claiming that those branches are the clear evidence of the offspring of the three wives of noah’s sons. What those same YEC will never admit is that they are ignoring the timescales involved in that chart. The branchings simply did not happen at the same time in history about 4,500 years ago.

Animals

To punish the “evil” people via a flood, there was no choice but to kill all the animals who would inevitably get caught up in the year-long event. That’s a problem because we have animals alive today and therefore the writers of genesis needed to find a way to preserve them. Hey presto: the big-boat concept was born – or more accurately, it was refined from other stories known to the author(s).

The following text about the animals involved are broken into major sections, however there is some overlap between those sections.

Clean?

One issue is how noah could have known which were the “clean” animals? The dietary laws were not going to be revealed to moses for another 1,000 years, so exactly how noah knew which were the “clean” animals is unknown – and certainly not explained in the bible. Also compounding the confusion is that god himself seems to have been confused on the topic when he promised mankind eating privileges over all of the animals following the flood: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you” (genesis 9:3). Pigs are definitely moving things that liveth, so the old testament technically permits the consumption of milkshakes containing bacon pieces (which I’m informed is a very nice drink).

It’s obvious that the “clean” bit was an afterthought because the initial verses in genesis only mention pairs of animals. It seems that a later author suddenly remembered the dietary laws as prescribed to moses and amended genesis accordingly. They probably also updated the plan when they remembered that spares of some animals were needed for sacrificial purposes.

Arrival?

Some dissenters pose the question: how could noah possibly have gone all over the world to collect pairs of animals? And that question becomes especially hard to answer when you realise that noah would have had to capture a viable male and a female of each animal. Fear not, religious reader because the bible makes it clear that the animals came to noah: “Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee” (genesis 6:20). The next verse is a little more problematic for the literalists because the writers of the bible correctly realised that the animals couldn’t bring their own food: “And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them” (genesis 6:21).

So, if you are a local-flood believer, you are still in the game because perhaps noah (or some of his clan) could have gone all over the Middle East to collect enough food for each animal for a year (although you still have to contend with the issue of food spoilage). If you are a global-flood believer you are in for a world of hurt because it’s impossible to believe that noah could have organised multiple expeditions over tens of thousands of kilometres to collect food that is specialised for the animals that were to make their way to the ark – and remember that he was instructed to get “all food that is eaten” by the animals. So let’s not have any naughty mistranslations suggesting that the animals were all happy to eat a narrow set of food they were given.

Consider the Australian koala bear – an animal which is not always as cute as it looks. The koala bear (Wikipedia link) is an extremely specialised eater, gathering leaves from about 30 types of eucalyptus trees – none of which are present in the Middle East. The bible is strangely silent as to how noah gathered a year’s worth of leaves for two koalas. It is also silent on how the koala got from Australia to the ark. They are slow walkers who greatly prefer sitting in a tree to placing their feet on the ground. Amazingly, if startled, they can move at about 30 km/h (about 19 mph) over short distances, but they would be lucky to waddle at just a few kilometres per hour over longer distances – something that they are not adapted to do. The shortest distance (involving mainly land) from the natural habitat of the koala to the Middle East is about 15,000 km (just over 9,000 miles), and therefore if a (generous) speed of 4 km/h is assumed as the walking speed for a koala, it would take two koalas almost six months to complete the journey. The bible is mute on how the koalas made that journey, especially as to how they completed the hundreds of kilometers of water crossings involved. Of course it gets worse because the koala sleeps for about 20 hours each day, which means that the journey would actually have taken six times longer, which is almost three years. Remember that noah was instructed to gather the food needed for the year contained inside the ark, so it is unknown how the koalas managed to feed themselves on the journey to and from the ark.

The “globalists” will start to talk about “the spirit of god” and “god’s will” being implanted into the koalas thus allowing them to complete the journey, however since it is not mentioned in the bible, that is nothing but a guess. And “god’s will” or not, the koalas still had to walk there, didn’t they? Such inventions are an example of the lengths that people have to go to when they start with the faulty foundation of the concept of a global flood. If the writers of the bible knew about “god’s will”, why didn’t they include the concept in the story? The notion that a pair of koalas could have ended up on the ark is as foolish an idea as can be imagined, but the global believers have to be able to (try and) explain it. The writers of the genesis fable didn’t have to be able to explain it because they had no idea what a koala was, let alone that it lived thousands of kilometers away in a place that would one day be known as Australia.

Incidentally, to jump the gun on another issue, the koala is the only extant representative of the family Phascolarctidae (genus Phascolarctos, species Cinereus) and therefore because it is the only member of its “kind”, it must have been on the ark (if you believe in a global flood).

How about the situation for the animals if a local flood is assumed? Well, the situation is much improved because it’s hard to prove that they all didn’t walk to the ark, eating native food along the way (or at least what could be found in the many desert regions). Still, it’s hard to imagine the spiders, insects, frogs, lizards, etc. making the journey on foot (on feet?) because the Middle East, at 7 million square kilometers (3.5 million square miles), is still a pretty big place. Are we expected to assume that somehow all of those animals lived within a short stroll of the ark’s location?

Food and waste?

What about the carnivores that made it onto the ark? What did they eat? If you believe in a global flood, then you have to consider the big cats found in Africa today (e.g. lions and cheetahs), and if you believe in a local flood then you have to consider meat-eating animals native to the Middle East (Wikipedia link) such as leopards, foxes and wolves. What did they eat while on the ark? The bible states that noah was to gather food for all the animals, so did he gather extra animals to use as food for the carnivores? Are we now missing animals (or entire “kinds”) that were eaten by the carnivores during the year afloat? There is nothing in the bible to suggest that animals changed their diet for the year-long voyage, so any attempt to suggest that is nothing but an unsupported guess.

It has been suggested that animals took up hibernation (perhaps awed by the “spirit of god”?) and therefore wouldn’t require much care or food for a year. Of course, that’s nothing but speculation that isn’t supported by either the bible or any behavioral evidence. No animal hibernates for a whole year and the vast majority of animals don’t hibernate at all. If they hibernated, why was noah instructed to collect food for them? Such a suggestion does give a clue as to the intellectually-dishonest depths people will descend to support the indefensible.

Then there’s the question of waste products produced by a large number of animals day in and day out for twelve months. Not only would it be an enormous job to tidy up after the animals, but the accumulation of methane gas would have been lethal to those involved in the act of full-time shoveling. As there was only one window at the top of the ark, some sort of lighting would have been needed for the lower levels, but since only naked flames would have been used, the likelihood of an explosion that would have blown the single door of its hinges would have been certain. In case you are inclined to believe that the methane was burned off gradually, remember that methane burning in air produces heat, water, and carbon dioxide; so where did those byproducts go?

Mission?

The literal story has a couple of problems at the end of the voyage because we are expected to believe that after seven months at sea the ark came to rest on the Ararat mountains, but even after the waters decreased for a further three months and forty days, the released dove could find “no rest for the sole of her foot”. How did the dove understand the mission of finding dry ground, and why did it not find some sort of ground, based on the waters having receded for over four months after the ark struck a mountain top? How did the dove manage to cover all the globe to determine that there was no available dry land?  Still, noah had confidence and sent the same dove for another reconnaissance mission just seven days later, and this time the dove found dry land. Really? No dry land after 8.5 months, but seven days later, all good to go? Believe that if you will, but you’re not going to explain how the dove managed to bring back an olive leaf. The whole point of the flood was to kill every living thing and there’s no way that an olive tree would have survived being covered in brackish water hundreds or even thousands of feet deep for 8.5 months. In fact, it’s unbelievable that an olive tree would have survived brackish water that covered it by at least one foot for 8.5 months. The writers of genesis were simply making things up at this point to complete their fairy tale.

Departure and sea level?

Another large problem for the animals would have been encountered when they were told to go forth and multiply. The globalists have re-inherited the many problems faced by animals such as the koala, as the pair attempted to make the long trek back to their native lands (e.g. to Australia at 4 km/h) – this time with absolutely no food because the flood had killed all vegetation. Incidentally, the poor flightless Kiwi bird had a harder time than the koalas, because after making it to Australia, it still had to cross almost 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) of ocean to get to New Zealand.

To counter such problems, a theory has been proffered by the apologists that the sea levels were much lower in 2,350 BCE than they are today, and therefore water crossings were either very much shorter or not needed at all due to uncovered land bridges. Such theories are the worst form of intellectual dishonesty because not only are they based solely on a desire for them to be true, but they are also in direct opposition to the evidence that we do have. The sea levels are very well known going back hundreds of thousands of years (based on the fossil record of where sea creatures are buried), and there is zero evidence to suggest that there has been any substantive change in sea levels (Wikipedia link) over the previous 5,000 years. At best it was less than a two meter rise in that time. The Tasman Sea has a maximum depth of 5,500 m (18,000 ft), so exactly how much lower would the current sea level have had to be in 2,350 BCE so that the poor Kiwi bird could have made the crossing to New Zealand?

It’s worth mentioning at this point (because issues related to this will come back numerous times) that the YEC have created a major rod for their backs by stating that the current Earth is no more than about 6,000 years old. The problem is that everything we see or know about Earth, its geology, and its people has to be squeezed into the period of time after the flood (in about 2,350 BCE), but before significant attempts at recorded history were made, e.g. by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. The sea level issue is a good example because any sort of significant rise of sea level during the time of the ancient Greeks would have been noted by them, and it wasn’t. So when did the sea levels rise to cover the hoped-for land bridges? In 2,000 or 1,750 or 1,500 BCE? We know that the earliest proto-alphabets date from about the 13th and 12th centuries BCE, so any major changes to the natural environment would have been recorded after their adoption. And of course the YEC are silent as to what natural force could have raised the sea level by many kilometres in the space of a few hundred years. The final killer to any such suggestion is that the ancient cultures of Egypt and China noted nothing (e.g. in hieroglyphs and other primitive writings) about any such rise in sea levels.

And of course, the real problems for the carnivores would have started the moment they managed to travel thousands of kilometres back to, say, Africa. Consider the lions and the antelopes (or similar). The antelope has a gestation period of about eight months, so for the first eight months of the return to Africa, there would have been two antelopes and two hungry lions licking their lips as they watched one of the antelopes getting fatter as its baby grew inside her. And the lions couldn’t just knock off the newly-born baby antelope because then the situation would have been back to just having a pair of antelopes. So the poor hungry lions would have had to wait for many, many generations of antelopes to develop so as to create a sustainable food source. How did the lions know to wait for suitable numbers of antelope to develop, and what did they eat while waiting? Did the “spirit of god” linger over all the carnivores in the world until they were good to start killing again? The bible is silent on that matter.

Genetics?

And what is the number of animals that create a viable base to avoid extinction in the worst case, and other genetic problems in the average case? The guys who wrote the bible had no idea that two isn’t the correct number, so they just went with the fairy tale version of a pair of each animal. Scientists today have developed the “50/500 rule” whereby a minimum viable population (Wikipedia link) needs 50 individuals to prevent inbreeding depression and 500 individuals to guard against genetic drift at-large. 

As an example, consider the genetics of the cheetah (Wikipedia link). The cheetah is believed to have had two population bottlenecks: one 100,000 years ago coinciding with the migration from North America to Asia, and the second 10,000 to 12,000 years ago in Africa due to the Late Pleistocene extinction (on the tailend of the last ice age). The cheetah is known to have unusually low genetic variability among individuals, which has led to poor breeding in captivity, increased spermatozoal defects, high juvenile mortality and increased susceptibility to diseases and infections. Normally, skin grafts between unrelated individuals in a species would be rejected, however such grafts heal well between unrelated cheetahs. Those are the sorts of things that happen when the numbers in a species drop to dangerously low levels. If animal life on Earth started with single breeding pairs about 4,500 years ago, we’d currently see enormous genetic problems with all species (including humans). We don’t. The suggestion that all species had only two or seven instances in our recent history is so ridiculous that it’s laughable.

Quantity?

How many animals were supposedly on the ark? Again, the answer is related to the theory that is adopted for the ark myth. In terms of species on Earth, there are about:

• 1,300,000 invertebrates (insects, molluscs, spiders, crustaceans, worms, sponges, corals, jellyfish, crabs, etc),
• 10,000 birds,
• 5,700 mammals,
• 48,000 spiders,
• 34,000 fish,
• 10,000 reptiles,
• 8,000 amphibians.

That’s about 1.5 million catalogued species. It is estimated that there are about 8.7 million species on Earth, with most being uncatalogued species that live in the ocean. So the number of species that would have had to fit on the ark is somewhere between 1.3 and 8.7 million. Exactly how did 2,600,000 invertebrates (a male and female of each species) make their way to the ark and get some sort of housing on the ark, is anyone’s guess?

They couldn’t just have been running loose on the ark because they would have eaten each other or been trodden on by people or other animals.

Then there’s the issue of which animals were on the ark and which weren’t. There are over 900,000 species of insect, so did noah or his unpaid workforce build little enclosures for each pair? If it takes ten minutes to build each insect enclosure, then noah would have taken just over 17 years to build them all – longer if he had to sleep, go to the bathroom, make a cup of tea, or get drunk (as was his want).

If you believe in a local flood, then the situation is obviously better, but there would still have to be tens of thousands of species located in the Middle East [sorry, couldn’t determine the exact number -Author].

Kinds

Because the thought that every species could have been on the ark is ridiculous, the apologists have come up with the “kinds” argument. Closer inspection of that argument shows it to be almost as ridiculous.

To the creationist, a “kind” is a type of proto-species, and the guess is that noah only had to have one of each proto-species on the ark because after disembarking, the proto-species would be able to go forth and multiply to produce the wide range of species that we know are alive today. It’s a neat logical trick because it reduces the number of animals required on the ark dramatically; some say down to 7,000 mammalian, amphibian, reptilian, and bird “kinds” (they don’t consider fish to have been on the ark, and insects are in the too-hard basket).

However no creationist has ever been able to define satisfactorily what a “kind” is, nor how the mechanism for later breeding worked (with some sort of actual evidence to back up the theory). Creationists have used a faulty understanding of biology to latch onto, and to pervert the facts and evidence to produce a theory of “kind” that only semi-supports the biblical ark fable.

When it comes to the insects, remember “And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died” (genesis 7:21-22). That means that all of those things outside of the ark died, so of course insects could not have survived floating on something for a year. And if anything did survive floating on something outside of the ark, then it turned out to be trivially easy to defeat the plans of the omniscient creator of the universe.

Over the previous 150 years, scientists have developed a Classification system (based on observable evidence) to relate characteristics of all life on earth. Here are the defined major classes with the specific names (in brackets) as they apply to the house cat:

• Life, 
• Realm (Eukaryote), 
• Kingdom (Animalia), 
• Phylum (Chordata), 
• Class (Mammalia), 
• Order (Carnivora), 
• Family (Felidae), 
• Genus (Felis), 
• Species (F. catus). 

Some of those classes have minor subdivisions which were omitted in the above list. The above list has reduced down to the concept of a cat, e.g. a domestic cat or a feral cat, but there are about 60 breeds of cats that we think of as being actual cats (such as the Siamese cat). As a simpler example, there are three species of elephant: the African Bush, the African Forest, and the Asian elephant, and we don’t consider breeds when it comes to the elephant.

A species (Wikipedia link) is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring. For example, if a horse and donkey mate they might produce a hybrid called a mule, however the mule will not be able to breed. There may be trivial exceptions, however the rule of two animals being able to breed only if they are from the same species is a pretty solid one.

Sometimes it is not about a hard and fast rule, but about the efficacy of the result. For example, African and Asian elephants cannot interbreed, except when they once did. In 1978 a bull calf was born as a result of the two different species mating, however despite intensive nursing, the calf was not viable and died a couple of weeks after being born. Nature tried to break the “rule” by permitting an offspring, but failed.

The hierarchy of classes gives information about the characteristics of each animal. For example, for the cat, the Order of Carnivora gives information that they are meat eaters. There is no such animal as a “Carnivora”, but if an animal is in the classification tree somewhere under that Order, it will share all the characteristics of Carnivora with any other animal that is also somewhere in the tree under that Order, e.g. a bear, or a wolf, or a walrus (all are also carnivores).

The higher you go up the tree, the more species will be somewhere under that position in the tree. For example, humans can be classified as being related to pine trees because we are both under the Realm of Eukaryote – which are organisms whose cells have a nucleus enclosed within membranes. You can take any two species and simply march back up the classification tree until you find a common node. It is fair to say that the higher up the tree the common node is, the less obvious is the relationship between the two species somewhere under that node. The construction of the classification tree – called taxonomy (Wikipedia link), is an amazing achievement of science, and is constantly being refined as evidence and new species are discovered (e.g. in the fossil record).

So, back to the creationist definition of “kind”. It is worth noting that despite the enormous amount of work done in the previous 150 years, no scientist has found the need to insert the word “kind” into any part of the classification tree. In terms of a scientific (or pseudo-scientific) use, the word is purely a hijacking by the religious. To get some of the groupings to work, a “kind” is interchangeably used as both the Order and the Family classification. The theory goes that noah would only have had to have one proto-animal of a given classification because that animal would have eventually produced all the species under that classification we have today. For example, let’s assume that only one proto-animal of the Order of Carnivora (Wikipedia link) was needed on the ark. What the religious are trying to tell you is that a single pair of breeding animals would eventually have produced all animals that we know of today as being in the following families: civets, cats, linsangs, genets, oyans, hyenas, mongooses, dogs, bears, walruses, seals, skunks, badgers, pandas, raccoons, weasels and otters. In terms of cutting down the number of animals needed on the ark, however it should be noted that there is zero evidence for the “kinds” theory and, to the contrary, there is a tremendous amount of DNA evidence that proves that it couldn’t have happened that way.

Instead of Order, if the next lower classification, Family is considered, then there’s still a problem for noah because there are about 20,000 families defined by biology. Consider the Mustelidae family which consists of about 60 species and hundreds of sub-species of animals such as tayra, wolverine, marten, fisher, badger, grison, polecat, weasel, otter, ferret, mink, and stoat. Creationists are expecting us to believe that one of these was selected as the proto-family member, kept on the ark for a year, and then rapidly diversified to produce all of the above examples (and there are many sub-species of each type listed above)?

And where in the fossil record are examples of all the other members of the proto-family pair that didn’t make it onto the ark? That’s a problem that creationists face no matter how they define “kind”. They have yet to produce a single example from the fossil record that is a candidate for being a proto-animal. Instead, what they will have you believe is that, if the ark story were to happen today, any one pair of dog (say a beagle) could be picked and after a year at sea, that pair could be released into the wild, and well within a thousand years could produce a large number of breeds. But it gets less likely because they also claim that the single pair of dogs would have produced the other members of the Family called Canidae, such as wolves, foxes, coyotes and jackals. In the extreme case, if they went higher up the tree, to the Order of Carnivora, then that same beagle pair would also “evolve” (within a millennium) into all cats (big and small), bears, walruses, etc. (as listed above).

Creationists would have us believe that the definition of “kinds” is somehow related to the ability to breed. They get this from phrases such as “every beast after his kind”, however the definition is extremely dodgy. From the above list (and it doesn’t matter whether you use the classifications of Family or Order to define “kinds”) we see that ferrets and wolverines are therefore of the same “kind” (they came after the same “kind”) – but they cannot interbreed. The alternative is to admit that the definition of “kind” is not the same now as it was in about 2,350 BCE, however that sort of redefinition encroaches dangerously into the territory of evolution.

Dinosaurs and Birds?

But it gets weirder for creationists who believe in the global flood because they have to find a way to explain the demise of the dinosaurs. There are over 700 species of dinosaurs known from the fossil record but the claim by the religious (without any scientific evidence) is that there are only about 50 “kinds” of dinosaurs? So what happened to the 50 breeding pairs of proto-dinosaurs? The whole point of the god-given plan was for the ark to preserve life, yet somehow the plan failed when it came to the proto-dinosaurs? And they must have died out because we don’t have any around today. The bible is eerily silent about the failure of the plan when it comes to the dinosaurs, and so are the creationists. If god really wanted to mess with the scientists’ minds, all he would have had to organize is for one of the 50 “kinds” of dinosaurs to survive the flood via the ark. Despite the odd “report” about the Loch Ness monster, there is zero (credible) evidence that any one of the non-avian dinosaurs that (known by real scientists to have gone extinct 65 million years ago) somehow survived to the present day after stepping off the ark.

It turns out that the dinosaurs are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to god’s failure because there are about 250,000 species of animals that have been discovered as fossils that have no post-flood evidence of existence. Is it really just a coincidence that all of the animals for which scientists have evidence of extinction prior to 2,350 BCE somehow failed to survive the protection plan devised by the omniscient creator of the universe? For example, scientists know that the many thousands of trilobite species flourished for 300 million years but finally went extinct about 250 million years ago. Global-flood believers say nuts to that because they must have been brought onto the ark as at least one proto-trilobite. If god wanted to save the trilobite, where are they today? Why are they all buried so deeply in the fossil record? (More on that problem later.)

And by the way, if there was only a bird “kind”, how come there were (at least) two species of bird on the ark: the dove and the raven? Ah, ha! You forgot that little fact didn’t you “kind” people? Was either the dove or the raven the bird “kind” that subsequently went on to evolve into every other species of bird found in the world today? Care to put your money on a genetic experiment that shows that every bird alive today is related to either the dove or the raven? If the dove and raven were on the ark and one or the other evolved rapidly into all the other birds we know of today, why do we still have both the dove and the raven? At least one of them should have lost its characteristics when it evolved into all the other birds alive today.

Aquatic

What about animals that live in water? Creationists dismiss having such animals on the ark because, as they live in water, the belief is that they could have survived on their own during a year-long flood. The bible supports that belief because it doesn’t mention aquatic animals in the list of the types of animals to be loaded onto the ark. Unfortunately this is clear evidence that the bible was written by mankind and not by the omniscient creator of the universe. The iron-age men who wrote the old testament were 2,500 years short of being marine biologists, and it shows. While there is no doubt that they knew that rivers were fresh water and the seas were salty water, they didn’t stop to consider that the average species from one environment would not be able to survive in the other environment.

Because aquatic life was not brought onto the ark, those animals were left in the rising waters – however that would have been their own version of short-termed hell. Because they have osmotic membranes that control and restrict the flow of water and salt in and out of their bodies, aquatic life is highly specialized to live in either saltwater or freshwater. Those membranes do not function in reverse if the animal is transferred to the other type of water. There are anadromous species of fish, e.g. the salmon, which can spend varying lengths of time in the other environment either for safety or to breed, but they are highly specialized and very rare when it comes to aquatic life. Freshwater averages a pH level of 7 and seawater averages a pH of 8 to 8.5, and while that sounds pretty similar, it must be remembered that on the pH scale (acidity to alkalinity scale) each 1.0 change is a factor of ten. Therefore the average sample of seawater has at least ten (to fifty) times the salt content as the average sample of freshwater. The mixing of lots of fresh flood water into the seawater would have been devastating to almost all aquatic life, because they simply could not have adapted their physiology to cope with the sudden change in salinity level.

The change in salinity level would also have been devastating to the habitats that support the food chains of all life. Also devastating would have been the increase in pressure for the creatures that have adapted to living on the floor of the oceans and rivers. Normal ocean currents move at about two meters per second however models of a global ocean flood indicate water movement forty times faster. When you add the debris into the excessively-turbulent water, the violence of the environment would also have been devastating to aquatic life.

Sunlight entering the water can travel up to 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) into the ocean under ideal conditions, but there is rarely any significant light beyond 200 meters (660 feet). This is important because even with a depth of a few hundred meters, all habitats on Earth would have been destroyed due to a lack of light. All plant life would have died during the year of submersion and due to the increase in salinity and the turbulent removal of top soil, the ability for regrowth and reestablishment of those environments would have been destroyed for a very long time.

The devastating aspect of this for flood-believers is that even if the habitats eventually were reformed (in one form or another), those habitats could not have existed at the very start of the period where the animals emerging from the ark would have needed them the most. Those animals would have had no semblance of vegetation upon which to feed for years and years (at the least), and therefore the entire food chain (such as it could have been with just pairs of animals) would have collapsed at the very time when they needed the most care and nurturing to have a chance of survival.

The last desperate attempt at “explaining” it all is for YEC to suggest that animals ate seaweed until plant stocks were re-established. Sure, there might have been a lot of seaweed (although growing in a much different salinity level has to be explained), however that seaweed would have rotted away in a matter of weeks following the disappearance of the flood waters, whereas in perfect growing condition, it would have taken well over a year for plants to have become a viable food source. And exactly how would the growing conditions be perfect when the newly deposited soil had an elevated pH level due to being mixed with salty water?

And while on the topic of plants, there is no mention (or evidence) of how plants (following the flood) managed to diversify into the variety we have today? So there was such a thing as a Cypress tree prior to the flood and somehow a type of proto-plant (that olive branch?) managed to evolve into every type of modern day plant, including (once again) the Cypress tree?

History

It all gets even harder to believe in “kinds” when you consider the other ancient cultures of the time. Inanna (a Wikipedia link) is an ancient Mesopotamian goddess (made up of course), and there is a surviving inscribed seal that depicts her with a lion. That seal is real and is dated between 2,350 and 2,150 BCE and therefore cannot have been more than 200 years after the flood (ignoring other logical problems surrounding the flood theory). So was the proto-cat “kind” a lion? If so, how did the domesticated cat also come about so quickly in, say, ancient Egypt, where they were known to have existed long before they were thought to have been domesticated – in about 2,000 BCE? It is incredulous to believe that one cat “kind” could have become both a lion and a house cat in less than a few hundred years, but that’s what the people who brought you the “kinds” theory want you to believe.

Then there’s the timescale to be considered. Exactly how long did it take to go from the one pair of each proto-animal in about 2,350 BCE to the 1.5 million cataloged species we see today? We know that the earliest proto-alphabets date from about the 13th and 12th centuries BCE, so there was only about 1,000 years for all of the species to flourish because after then we would have been recording the rapid “evolution” of proto-animals into distinct species. Of course there is no evidence of any such explosive change in that 1,000 years, but even worse for creationists, there is no evidence of any continuing change in the next 3,000 years (up until our present time).

That’s right, the theory of “kinds” relies on an extraordinary rate of change, followed by the switching off of that rate of change. Exactly what could have caused that? The belief in that possibility is simply too idiotic to be believed. And remember that the YEC also has to find a way to squeeze in an ice age after the flood!

Translation and Baraminology

The main problem with the “kinds” argument is that it is an artificial construct designed to try and lend credence to a hopeless situation (the belief in a global flood). And what’s more, there is evidence to indicate that it is an intellectually-dishonest construct. Its use is based on passages such as “They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort” (genesis 7:14), however note the word “sort” instead of “kind” at the end of that verse. It’s really not clear what “after his kind” means, but it doesn’t definitively mean any particular type of grouping.

Here’s the same verse taken from the Common English bible “They and every kind of animal—every kind of livestock, every kind that crawls on the ground, every kind of bird”, which is a pretty big relax on the “after his kind” language. If I asked a child to list every kind of bird, they wouldn’t start and stop with one generic type of proto-bird “kind”; they’d start to list every bird species they could remember.

Here’s the same verse taken from the Complete Jewish bible “they, and every animal of every species, all the livestock of every species, every animal that creeps on the ground of every species, and every bird of every species — all sorts of winged creatures”. And at that point you can probably step back and say “wow” because there’s no way that you are going to be able to interpret that verse as an argument for “kinds”.

This site has steered clear of esoteric interpretation of translations, but it certainly seems that the one thing that is keeping the global theory of the flood afloat (if you’ll pardon the expression) is the use and interpretation of language to do with “kinds”. The word in biblical Hebrew from which “kind” is derived is “min”, however even the authoritative source that is Strong’s Concordance gives the definition of “min” as “kind, species”.

Sorry, but there’s simply no way that anyone can prove that the writers of genesis meant anything other than “species” when they were describing which animals were to be brought onto the ark. That must come as a relief to those who believe in the local flood version because it removes a large number of insurmountable problems inherited when “kinds” is made part of the theory. The writers of the bible had no idea of groupings of animals into “kinds” but they knew what a species was because they could see the exact definition of each animal around them all the time (e.g., a cow, a fox, a snake, a heron, a swordfish, an ant, etc.).

That hasn’t stopped creationists from trying to elevate the theory of “kinds” into a science – which they call baraminology. The stem of the word is a portmanteau of the Hebrew words “bara” (created) and “min” (kind). At best the attempt is a pseudoscience whose sole purpose is to try and justify the squeezing of the world’s animals onto a whopping-big fictional boat.

As a system set up in competition to the one used in biology’s taxonomy, it fails miserably. Its main problem is that it requires a mechanism that causes diversification at super-evolutionary speeds and which gets turned on and off to match other undeniable evidence, e.g. the fact that no such rapid diversification has been witnessed in the previous 3,000 years. At best it only works if “god dunnit”™ is accepted as a “scientific” factor.

Geography

And an awful lot of water was required if “and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered” (genesis 7:19-20), and the bible tells us that the water came from rainfall that fell for forty days and forty nights. Cryptically, it also mentions something about “fountains of the deep” (genesis 7-11 and genesis 8-2), potentially as a water source. It makes no mention of how those “fountains” worked, and since the men who wrote the old testament were 2,500 years short of being oceanographers and geologists, we’ll never know how they came to believe that water somehow came from some sort of underground caverns. It also makes no mention of how the water managed to get back into those caverns after the flood (if indeed it did), but since much of the world has been carefully studied (seismically) as part of oil and gas exploration, suffice to say that no such mind-bendingly huge caverns (with or without water) have been found.

Covering all the mountains with water also comes down to a matter of definition, and it seems that there are three main camps. There are the localists who believe that only some or all of the Middle East was flooded, there are the globalists who believe that the entire Earth was covered, and weirdly, there are the globalists who believe that a very different Earth was entirely covered.

To believe that the entire Earth (as we know it) was covered up to a depth just over Mount Everest is an absurdity in the extreme. Mount Everest is 8,848 meters (29,029 ft) high, which means that 8.8 km (5.5 miles) of water would have had to rest over all the low-lying areas in the world. Can 40 days and nights of torrential rain cover the world? The highest intensity (Wikipedia link) of rainfall today is termed “violent rain” and is defined as at least 50 mm (2 inches) of water per hour. If it rained at that intensity for 40 days then only 48 meters (157 feet) of rain would have fallen. That’s not even the length of an Olympic swimming pool standing on its end.

If the biblical flood is supposed to be over the entire world then it couldn’t cover Mt Everest, and if it was only in the Middle East then it couldn’t cover Mt Ararat (5,137 meters or 16,800 feet) – where the ark is supposed to have landed. It couldn’t even have been close to covering Mt Hermon in Israel (2,814 meters or 9,200 feet). That’s an awful lot of water that would have had to be added by the “fountains of the deep” – well over 150 times the amount of water caused by the rainfall.

Mt Hermon is an interesting case when it comes to considering the flood. The mountain is about 60 km (37 miles) south-east of Beirut and about 190 kms (118 miles) north-north-east of Jerusalem. If you travel west from the summit of Mt Hermon for 54 kms (33 miles) you will reach the Mediterranean sea. It is all pretty much downhill from Mt Hermon to the sea, and there is no taller peak or range between it and the sea. So consider what would happen if/when the great flood of noah started in that part of the Middle East. The people living in that area would have sought higher ground, and simply walked up the slopes of Mt Hermon until they reached the summit.

The bible tells us that the summit of Mt Hermon wasn’t high enough because the waters just kept rising (remember that the purpose of the flood was to kill all the evil people), but consider the land west of the summit of Mt Hermon. There is no natural barrier until the sea is reached, so as the water level was climbing up the sides of the mountain it was also draining into the Mediterranean sea, and that sea was draining into the Atlantic ocean, and because all of the oceans in the world are connected, they must all have been rising. So if the flood was local, it must also have been global. What say you to that “localists”?

Or perhaps you do not believe that any of the one billion (or more) evil people who needed killing lived on the coastal plains between Jerusalem and Beirut in 2,350 BCE?

A similar argument to the above can be considered for Mt Ararat which is in the extreme east of Turkey, 15 kms (9.3 miles) from the border with Iran. Ararat is 1,150 kms (715 miles) north-north-west of the Persian Gulf, which connects out to the Indian Ocean, and therefore with the rest of the oceans in the world. The land falls off quickly from Ararat and by the time it reaches Lake Urmia just 250 kms (155 miles) on the way to the Gulf, it is already down to 1,270 meters (4,200 feet). There must have been people living between Ararat and the Gulf, so as the flood waters rose to murder them (on their way to covering Ararat), the waters must have been draining into the Persian Gulf and therefore into the rest of the world’s oceans.

It simply isn’t possible to have widespread “local” floods which had the purpose of killing all the evil people alive in the world (or even in the local region). On the other hand, it is easy to believe that there were many local floods in the various deltas and valleys in the Middle East, but then you have the problem of those floods not being able to kill the wicked people over the next mountain range. And therein lies a major problem for the more moderate religious folk: they will never define how local is “local”.

Because widespread “local” floods that killed all the evil people were not possible and because there simply isn’t enough water to cover Mount Everest, a third type of flood has been proposed by twitching and desperate religious folk. Believe it or not, they propose that the entire Earth was much flatter back then and that there were no large mountain ranges! The mountains (according to them) were lifted up due to the intense activity of the flood waters themselves. [You’ll probably need a moment to stop laughing – so take your time.]

Note that they propose such things without a shred of evidence, and on the contrary, there is a significant amount of geological evidence to prove that such a “theory” is impossible. However such people don’t sully themselves with anything like evidence because all they do is assume a certain position to be correct and then try to find ways to make the impossible fit that position. The term for such an approach is: intellectual dishonesty. To labor the ridiculous, their “theory” means that everything you can see today: every mountain more than a few hundred meters high, every escarpment and rock cutting, and everything we’ve determined via core-drilled samples taken all over the world … formed in under twelve months in around 2,350 BCE.

All three forms of the flood theory fail simple logical tests. They fail all scientific tests. There are even wilder theories, e.g. such as the idea that all of the continents were pushed together prior to the flood and broke up to form the current view of the world we have today because of the flood, but those theories are just too ridiculous, stupid, and unsupportable to linger upon here.

Trees

The above environmental issues are devastating to the global flood theory, but there are many other problems.

Dendrochronology is the study of the dating of trees via their growth rings. Every year a tree grows, it gets a little wider, and that extra width is because a new ring has been added just under the bark. The rings are like a tree’s fingerprint and each ring gives an indication about the growing conditions in that year. In good growing conditions, the tree will put on more “weight” and will have thicker growth rings. If a tree is sliced parallel to the ground (to leave a stump), a full cross section of the rings is displayed and the history of the tree, including its age, can be determined. Of course, slicing a tree to leave a stump kills the tree, which is appropriate for logging but not such a nice thing for a scientist to do. Instead, a thin cylindrical core of the tree’s timber can be drilled from the outside to the center, and that long pencil-thin core extracted for analysis. That technique reveals all the information needed about the tree’s rings, and doesn’t kill the tree.

You might be wondering what this has to do with noah’s ark since trees are only a few hundred years old, right? Well, it might surprise you to learn that dendrochronology has determined that the oldest living tree on Earth today germinated in 2,833 BCE. That’s right, there is a single tree that is over 4,850 years old. Ironically, the tree is named Methuselah (a Wikipedia link) and it is a Great Basin bristlecone pine which is growing in the White Mountains of Inyo County in eastern California. That means that it was almost 500 years old when noah’s flood supposedly occurred. Since a tree could not have survived being submerged for a year in salty water, that’s a problem for the global-flood believers. In fact, in itself it’s proof that the flood didn’t happen because it could not have survived being covered with water (resulting in a dark and salty environment) for a year.

It gets worse for YEC because the bristlecone pine grows on dolomite (a sedimentary rock which is claimed was laid down by the flood), which means that it gets even harder to explain how all those tree rings fit into the post-flood time frame.

Creationists try to discredit the counting of tree rings by pointing out that some species of tree can grow more than one tree ring per year. That’s true, but unfortunately for that argument the bristlecone pine is a tree that is known to grow exactly one tree ring per year (a Journal of Geophysical Research link).

The study of tree rings is quite interesting because it’s not just relevant for individual trees. Each tree’s rings reveal a “fingerprint” that is unique to the lifespan of the tree in the environment in which it has grown. However if older trees (now deceased) are found in a similar environment (e.g. if they were buried and preserved), the common (overlapping) tree rings can be aligned and an even longer timeframe can be determined (rings before and after the common rings). This process can be repeated for even older deceased trees.

The maximum span for a fully-anchored chronology is currently a little over 11,000 years. So, to the YEC, how do you explain that there is simple scientific evidence that the Earth is at least 5,000 years older than the omniscient creator of the universe has led you to believe it is? The scary thing is that the scientific ability needed to verify that technique is the ability to align tree ring samples and to count to 11,000. The even more devastating thing for YEC is that carbon dating has independently verified that age. Game over, man.

As an aside, there is a modern-day application for tree-ring analysis because if the origin of the timber is known, a cross section of the frame of a painting can be matched to known tree ring patterns to determine its age. Neat!

Ice

In eastern Antarctica, the ice sheet covering the underlying land is about three kilometers (1.9 miles) thick and is believed to be at least 1.5 million years old. That’s much older than 6,000 years. In Greenland, the visible layers in an extracted ice core can be dated by visually counting annual hoar frost layers back to about 10,000 BCE and from 10,000 to 110,000 BCE by visually counting annual dust layers (again, that’s more than 6,000 years).

There is no evidence in the extracted ice samples for a global flood. A flood would have been devastating to the ice because it would have caused it to melt (to at least some degree), and more likely it would have caused large chunks to float to the surface and break up (something for which there is no evidence). It most certainly would have left a noticeable effect on one or more layers in the ice, however it didn’t do that.

For some reason these facts don’t deter YEC from telling children that noah put animals on a wooden boat in about 2,350 BCE?

Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics (a Wikipedia page) is a branch of physics that studies how temperature, heat and work relate to matter, energy and entropy. It provides laws that explain (among other things) how heat is transferred in a changing system.

Just because something might appear to be cool (e.g. ocean water) does not mean that heat is not involved. The lowest temperature possible in our universe is defined as 0 Kelvin, and that equates to about -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (-273.15 degrees Celsius). On that scale, global ocean average surface temperatures are about 290 to 293 Kelvin (17 to 20 Celsius).

When water is agitated its heat increases. You don’t notice that in your kitchen (e.g. if you shake a container of water) because the effect is too small and the dissipation of the heat generated is too quick. On the other hand, when something on the scale of a global flood is considered, the increase in temperature required would be so extreme as to be impossible.

• Some creationists believe that at least some of the flood water came from water vapor already in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the temperature increase required to turn water vapor into liquid (via condensation) would mean raising the atmospheric temperature to thousands of degrees Celsius. That would cause the water to boil and the surface of the planet to be incinerated.
• Some creationists believe that the Earth’s surface was reshaped during the events of the flood. If such cataclysmic forces occured that moved continental plates and formed new ocean beds over a period of just weeks or months, the amount of thermal energy released would heat the Earth’s crust to a molten state.
• Some creationists believe that billions of years of radioactive decay (that would be needed to account for the radiometric effects that we observe) were compressed into a year-long event, however that would generate enough radiogenic heat to melt the crust many times over.
• The energy involved in moving miles-deep columns of water across the globe would convert kinetic and potential energy into enough thermal energy to cause water temperatures to rise far beyond the tolerance of marine life.

In a closed system, energy cannot be created or destroyed, so it must be transformed. Global flood models require in excess of 10²⁸ joules or more of thermal energy (depending on the model). That amount of energy is about what the sun produces in 26 seconds or about 17 million years of humanity’s total annual energy consumption. The earth cannot radiate or vent that amount of energy into space within the timeframe of a year, so the planet would be transformed into a molten pressure cooker.

The ignorance and superstitious iron-age men who wrote the global-flood myth had no idea about thermodynamics. They invented a story that is literally impossible.

How the flood fable originated

Real floods

The fact that the story of a supposed flood at the time of the fictional character of noah is so ridiculous that it warrants no consideration by anyone who has done even the most perfunctory of research begs the question as to how the story could have reasonably come into existence? Luckily, there is a straightforward explanation.

That explanation is not that the story is allegorical. The plain (and brief) language used to tell the story in genesis is nothing like an allegory. It’s not a metaphor when precise ages, times and measurements are documented (see the summary above). The ignorant men who wrote the bible took stories (real and imagined) and embellished them into what they believed was an appropriate tale for the god they believed had created the universe only a few thousand years earlier. Of course they knew that they were lying when they embellished earlier stories, but it’s not hard to believe that they thought they were doing it for a just cause. (As we know now, they weren’t.)

The real reason the tale came into existence is that those authors did not have much of a clue about the world on which they existed. Everything in the bible occurs within a circle with a radius of about 500 miles (800 km), so when they wrote about “global” events they reasonably expected those events to have occurred in an area not much bigger than the local geography of which they were aware. Therefore a huge local flood would easily have been extrapolated to being (in their minds) a global event. The third option described above for the scope of flooding therefore comes about if you stop thinking like a modern-day person and start thinking like one of the men who wrote genesis. What they knew of as global, we today think of as local.

Was there such a flood or floods? Well, yes.

The Burckle crater (a Wikipedia link) is an undersea feature about 29 kilometers (18 miles) in diameter, in the south-western Indian Ocean. It is believed to be the result of a large asteroid impact in about 3,000 to 2,800 BCE. The site of the impact was pinpointed by studying prehistoric chevron dune formations in Australia and Madagascar. The distance from the impact site to Australia is about the same as the distance from the impact to the edge of the Arabian Gulf in southern Iraq. It’s quite likely that an enormous amount of water caused by a tsunami inundated the lands of people living in the lower parts of the Middle East, and therefore entered their collective consciousness in the form of tales retold over the ages.

Archaeological excavations indicate that Shuruppak (modern day Tall Faʾrah in Iraq) was destroyed by a flood in about 2,800 BCE, and there are at least two ancient Sumerian documents recording the flood: one which mentions Shuruppak and one which mentions Ziusudra – who was an actual king who reigned over Shuruppak at the time. The story of Ziusudra was passed down and incorporated into both the Atra-Hasis flood myth and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The story of noah’s flood in the Bible likely stems from the same Mesopotamian oral traditions that gave us Atra-Hasis and the Epic of Gilgamesh, but of course the authors of genesis repurposed the story by omitting the pagan elements and inserting the wrath of their new god. Incidentally, Ziusudra was taken to the dwelling place of the gods after the landing of his ark, and in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim was rewarded with immortality. Contrast that with noah who became a naked old drunk who cursed his own kid.

In fact there are a large number of cultures which have myths about floods (a Wikipedia link). That’s not just because of a possible asteroid impact; rather it’s because over a long enough time frame, large-scale floods are likely in many regions of the world. We see large-scale flooding today, but the once-in-a-five-hundred-year flood event would have been terrifying to primitive people and would have been an event embellished by the survivors. Remember that the people of the time had no scientific training or understanding, and it might not even have rained much in the regions that ended up receiving the flood waters. Such an event would have been very mysterious to uneducated people and the only reasonable explanation would be that one or more gods were angry.

The religious like to obfuscate the issue by claiming that the fact that there are so many cultures with flood myths somehow proves the biblical flood of noah. Nothing could be further from the truth. The various flood myths are spread out by hundreds of years, not in the same time or location as noah, and as described by the fables are very different in nature and purpose. The writers could have avoided all flood-related problems by using a passover technique to achieve genocide, but they felt the flood-based mythology that was inherent in many other cultures simply too important not to get into the religious texts they were writing (for their own purposes). Perhaps that’s because real devastating floods did happen and they needed to include what was only explainable (to them) as the work of a god?

Rainbows

Then there’s the “significance” of the rainbow: “I do set my bow [rainbow] in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh” (genesis 9:13-15). This was written in the first person however it is never explained who was around 1,800 years before genesis was written to record those words, and neither is it explained how those words managed to survive the passage of time between being uttered and being written in genesis?

The rainbow must have been an astonishing occurrence to ignorant and superstitious men in ancient times. To us it is a phenomenon that is easily explained: the diffraction, via fine water droplets in the atmosphere, of the spectrum of light of different wavelengths contained in sunlight. To people with no understanding of the nature of light, the only explanation for the rainbow was that it was something created by god.

The physics of the nature of light being diffracted through moisture has not changed since the laws of the universe in which we live came into existence billions of years ago, so the thought that god repurposed the rainbow to signify some sort of covenant with his beloved creation (the one on which he had just performed genocide) is so ridiculous as to be nothing but a source of ridicule. And why would the omniscient creator of the universe need a reminder not to forget his supposed covenant? Surely he could just have added a reminder on a Post-it Note in his office?

And it seems that he has a covenant not to wipe out all but eight of the world’s people, but he has no problem allowing a large number of floods that have killed millions of people (a Wikipedia link)? So if the noah flood was local, then how come god has ignored the rainbow and allowed so many local floods that have killed so many people?

Ark found?

From time to time a story does the rounds that an ark-like structure has been found on a mountain, and there have been many such reports over the previous 150 or so years. One such example is the Durupinar site in Turkey (a Wikipedia link):

Spoiler: the above is a natural rock formation and definitely not the petrified remains of a wooden boat. It was shown to be nothing more than a natural formation in the mid 1990s.

Realize that the quantity of such stories does nothing to promote authenticity because not a single one of them has been proven to be correct (in terms of being global). Based on what you’ve read above, how could they be correct?

In case you are tempted to join the delusion and mount a campaign to go and find evidence of the ark, it’s worth remembering that the bible does not say that the ark came to rest on an actual mountain called Ararat; just in the Ararat region. In fact, what we know as Mount Ararat was only named after the bible was written. (Just trying to help in case you were packing your bags to go look for an ark-like structure somewhere.)

And as expected, this “discovery” did the rounds again in the second half of 2026. Yep, even though it had been conclusively proven not to be the remains of a wooden sailing structure (over 30 years ago), a whole new set of YouTubers decided to present “Finally found”-type videos to inspire their delusional followers. If it wasn’t so sad, it would be funny.

The people posting the videos don’t of course believe that the ark was found, so why do they make the videos? The reason is to blur reality with fiction and to plant a seed in their followers’ imaginations. It’s a question of quantity, in that if enough stories do the rounds, then their followers will come to believe that at least one of the stories over the years has to be true (purely based on the number of reports). There’s also the motive of making money from such videos.

Conclusion

When the dust settles on the silly fable of a flood at the time of the fictional character of noah it’s important to remember the different approaches taken by science and religion. Science starts with evidence and then forms testable theories, whereas religion starts with conclusions and then manipulates evidence (real or invented) in an attempt to support those conclusions.

Nowhere is that distinction clearer than when it comes to the fictional fairy tale of the fictional character of noah – and his fictional “flood”.