Discussion

Title	Author	Date
Noah's Ark	Elphick, Michael	Apr 25, 2005
Dear Amiel, I did enjoy reading your account of genesis "A Masterpiece Chockfull of Inconsistencies": - http://www.nctimes.net/~mark/bibl_science/bible-science.htm I have recently gone thought exactly the same process. I find the early chapters in Genesis fascinating and quite lovely. It's the first time in 45 years that I have read them, thanks to the challenge of a Creation Scientist! I wonder if you have read the creation story of Haggadah, one of the books that did not make it into the Bible? This is a bible story with some real fun in it! The Epic of Gilgamesh is also worth reading for its similarities to the Noah Flood story. Why am I writing? It's because your calculations regarding the mass of animals in the Ark are flawed. You take the horse as a representative of all animals, which is quite wrong! I was following the same reasoning - how many animals could you get into the Ark? - when I can across your essay. From internet searches I found that there are 4000-5000 species of mammal, 3,500 of amphibian, 6,500 of reptiles and 10,000 species of bird. From that, excluding insects, I have calculated an approximate mass not in excess of 5,000 tons (assuming each *mammal* was equivalent to a horse, and there were two of them, male and female). You need to put this right before a Creationist discovers and ridicules it! Actually, the quantity of food required at 5% of body weight per day over a period of a year (90,000 tons), greatly exceeds the mass of animals, so your conclusions are correct. The Noah story does not mention plants, presumably these were kept on board as seeds, so it's strange that the dove could come back with a freshly plucked olive leaf when the earth had been wiped clean of all living creatures. Sincerely yours, Michael Elphick.