In Reply to: re: stand on zanzibar posted by Realist on January 09, 2010 at 17:11:21:

Yes we do tend to have quite large gardens here once you go outside the town. My own garden is 2/3 of an acre so the Ark would almost fit on it. Compare that with the Bronx Zoo of 265 acres and with a mere 4000 animals. And yes the 40,000 m3 Ark volume is based on Genesis. I am taking a cubit to be 0.444 m in my calculations. This makes the Ark 133.2 x 22.2 x 13.3 m in length, breadth and depth as per your Genesis citation or just about 40,000 cubic metres.

I'm afraid the argument that not all land species were in the Ark doesn't wash if you insist on reading the Bible literally.

The Bible is quite clear that all species were created in the first days of Creation – the land animals we are discussing here on Day 6. You can't really invoke subsequent evolution and development of species additional to those around in Noah's time now can you?

We can count the number of terrestrial species alive today – (And I have deliberately excluded fish and fully aquatic species such as dolphins in the counting). These are severe underestimates of the number of species alive today: mammals: 4,000; amphibians: 6,500; birds: 8,500, reptiles: 8,000; insects: 1,000,000. We are still discovering new species especially of insects – I have had colleagues who have named quite a few species new to science in the recent past so the number is growing. If they are here today then they must have been on Noah's boat surely?

Then you insist on adding extinct species that died out 60 million or more years before Noah - so we add dinosaurs: 700 and for pterodactyls etc: 700 more species.

The word ‘kinds’ in the biblical sense refers to organisms that can interbreed and produce viable young that can also breed to produce the same species. This is also the modern definition of a species and these counts are thus 'kinds'. There’s no point in having just genera or family level representatives of each species – evolution certainly doesn’t operate fast enough to produce the number of species we can count today in a few thousand years.

If you want the number of species to match what we can count with our God-given eyes then Noah must have had them on board because they are alive today surely? Otherwise where did they come from? Surely the Bible cannot be wrong when it said God created all the dry land beasts we are discussing on Day 6 of the Creation? Evolution does not occur in your book so where did all the rest come from? Is the Bible wrong and the world was not actually inundated at all? Is the flood therefore just a story?

My basic number of vertebrates for pairs is only 57,000 but they really do have to have food over the 10 months afloat. They cannot be just all crammed into a few containers - polar bears may very well decide that they like penguins after all.

My space calculations are very conservative - putting the average mammal into a 3 cubic foot rabbit hutch is pretty cruel but it means that they take up quite a bit of space. For example if you have 700 species of dinosaur each in a 3x3x3m cage that in itself is 90% of the Ark volume gone before you even think about food. Remember that it is difficult to tell the sexes apart in reptiles and to be sure that Noah was obeying the command to have male and female they would have to be pretty big. At 3 metres they are still babies but we will give Noah some expertise in being able to sex reptiles at a young age.

Some creationist commentators suggest that there were 6 or 7 of each species on board for food purposes. This makes eminent sense but it immediately pushes the total volume needed to over three times the total Ark volume allowed for in Genesis.

And you still need the fodder for the herbivore species. Again we have to realistic about how much food animals actually need if they are going to survive for 10 months and step off onto the first islands appearing above the water and survive to yield the descendants that we can see around us today. The calculations are easy and that food volume is also enormous – over twice the volume of the Ark to feed just 2 of each species.

I will check out your ID 'argument' when I find it.