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| 3,000,000 is a VERY low estimate! |
"Amateurs built the ark, professionals built the Titanic"
This old saying is supposed to suggest that just because you're an amateur doesn't mean your skilled, and just because your a professional, doesn't mean that you're skillfully perfect. Of course, so believers take it a step further as a claim that you can't trust 'so called' expert scientists, but you can trust the faithful.
But the phrase is flawed. The first is that there never was an ark. There's no evidence that Noah actually existed, let alone built a boat to house every species of Earth. Even with the lack of evidence for the ark and the flood, the premise itself is incredibly flawed. If Noah got every creature into an ark of the dimensions the Bible gives, the only explanation is that he was an iteration of the Doctor before the TARDIS's chameleon switch was broken. After all, the ark would need to be much, much bigger on the inside.
So it's really an unfair comparison. While it is true that the Titanic's owners cut corners that caused it to sink faster than it should, it wasn't the absolute failure this phrase makes it out to be. Yes, the rivet placement from cost cutting became an issue after the impact. Yes, the owners didn't install enough lifeboats for aesthetic reasons. But you must remember. If the Titanic never hit that iceberg, it wouldn't have sunk.
What this phrase is actually doing is blaming the ship for the captain's navigational error. That is like blaming a car for an accident when the driver misses a turn and crashes into a tree. Is that the cars's fault, or the driver's? The same is true of the Titanic example.
So if we look at the old phrase again, and instead consider like conditions, you either end up with the ark either being the greater tragedy, or the Titanic finishing a successful voyage in a ship much more impressive looking than the (imaginary) ark.So remember, just because an old saying sounds clever, it doesn't mean it actually is.
-Brain Hulk
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I agree with what you say that the Arc cannot be compared to the Titanic, after all they were designed for a different purpose, the Arc to float and the Titanic to sail, plus Noah was 600 years old when he went into the Ark so I would think he had a lot of experience of building with wood.
ReplyDeleteAs for your calculations on what Noah took into the Ark, these are totally wrong here’s why…
8 People - I think we all agree on that, Noah, his wife, their 3 sons and their wives
17,400 birds – The bible tells us that God told Noah to take them according to their KIND not according to their SPECIES, there is estimated to be around 30 different Kinds of bird (animals.about.com)
12,000 Reptiles – again it was according to their Kind, not species, plus Noah would not have taken reptiles that can live in water such as turtles, crocodiles can live in water as can some snakes
9,000 Mammals – again it was according to their kind which can greatly reduce that figure, you can’t give a fully accurate figure because of Whales, dolphins, seals, sea lions otters.
5,000 amphibians – nope! Amphibians breathe through their skin and typically start out as larva in water – God said only those in who’s “nostrils” is the breath of life
2,000,000 insects – Same as Amphibians they breathe through their skin, insects can live in the mud underwater for long periods of time as they require very little oxygen. Insects such as Ants build their burrows in such a way that they do not flood when it rains, plus there are insects that spend their entire life in the water.
It is believed that Noah took around 8,000 different KINDS of animal onto the Arc, this being true the calculation should be as follows:-
39089.7 square m on the Ark
8,000 KINDS of animal x 2 + Noah & his family (this is 8 not 4 as in your picture) = 16,008
39089.7 divide by 16,008 = 2.44 square m
Plus Noah was 600 years old when he and his family went into the Arc, he was wise enough to know not to take adult animals, he would have taken young animals…as young as possible, they eat less, they weigh less and they will live longer to produce more offspring which is the main reason for taking them onto the Arc
As for saying that the Ark didn’t exist, there is no way for you to prove that either, but there is a boat shaped object that has been found in the mountains of Ararat (where the bible tells us the Arc finally came to rest) it is made of petrified wood (fossilised wood) and has the same measurements as the Arc, I am not saying that it is the Arc as I can’t prove it for sure but it is a possibility that it could be.
Scooby,
DeleteThanks for the comment, but I can't say that I agree with your opinion or figures. As for the distinction between floating vs sailing. The only difference there is the inclusion of an engine/drivetrain. The only real difference is that the Titanic would have a slightly lower percentage of it's space available to occupants, but they both still need to float and hold a lot of passengers.
600 years of experience: Ignoring the laughable age, experience wouldn't matter. No amount of experience gets you around physics. The simple fact is that a wooden vessel constructed as described in the Bible simply wouldn't have worked.
Kinds vs Species: So you are employing evolution to make the numbers more favorable? While I am happy that you are not an evolution denier, the time after the flood would have been insufficient to reach the grand diversity that we see today.
Animals that live in water: This wouldn't help either. Animals that live in the water live in either salt water or fresh water. Many must also be in a specific pH range to survive. The mixing of the salt ocean waters in the fresh flood waters would mean that the salinity of the water would either be too high or low for the majority of sea life, and would thus perish. Also, there are many aquatic mammals/reptiles/amphibians that still require land to survive since they can't stay in the water all the time.
Also, if aquatic creatures were fine, we should see that aquatic creatures vastly outnumber land creatures since their numbers would have been unaffected by the flood. So aquatic mammals should vastly outnumber the land mammals who had their numbers reduced to only one pair each. However, this is not the case.
All of this also ignores the elevation the water would have reached in order to cover the entire Earth. The water needed to cover Everest, so the water at the top would have been incredibly cold and lethal to most of the animals in the water. But swimming down wouldn't help either, as water pressure increases the deeper you go. This means that the pressure would be lethal before most animals got deep enough to reach any warm waters that may still remain. But even if they did, the cold would spread throughout the water more and more over the course of the year the Ark was afloat. This would leave only a few extremophiles remaining to represent the whole of the aquatic community.
Amphibians: While they do go from eggs, to an intermediary stage, and then transform into their adult form that doesn't help matters any. But while you are claiming amphibians to help your cause, they are actually very harmful to it. Amphibians are typically regarded as indicator species. This means that the presence of amphibians is a sign of good and stable conditions. But they are are also very susceptible to change. Small changes in the environment can be lethal to many amphibian species. A global flood would have turned conditions on their head and been catastrophic to amphibians. So actually, the fact that amphibians still exist at all, and in the number they still do is another big indication that there was no flood.
DeleteInsects: The water pressure would also have been too great, and they would become over-saturated. The low temperatures would also kill the majority. Again, the majority of insects would be dead, and we shouldn't see so many now as a result. But this isn't the case.
Your numbers/2.44m: This would still be a woefully insufficient amount of space. Even if all the animals were old enough to be weaned from their mother, there is still be room for food even for the smaller mouths for a year, nor any way of dealing with a year's worth of waste or the constant Arctic conditions once the waters reached their peak.
You can't prove there was no Ark: True, but I don't have to. I'm not the one making a positive claim. You are. The burden of proof lies with the person making a positive claim. I no more have to prove that there was no Ark than that Stevie Wonder doesn't run about my house draped with a cloak of invisibility. After all, no one can ever completely prove that something doesn't exist, so it's on the claimant to proof the claim, not the other way around. Yes, another claimed Ark. And another claim that has not passed the test of valification. If scientific can prove it was the Ark, then we can talk. Until then it's just another ghost story.
-Brain Hulk
Well about the everest argument most of us who think the flood happen think it also created most of the geological features so the flood wouldnt have to cover mount everest. Most of these obections have been answered before if your interested you can look at it
Deleteme!!!!!!!, I know that there are global flood adherents that believe that, and argue that. It also isn't a new argument to me. The simple fact is that, that isn't how those geological formations are formed. I also know that theists have offered answers to most of what is listed throughout here, but offering an answer isn't enough. The answer must also stand up to scrutiny. Every 'answer' I've ever heard in regards to the flood simply doesn't stand up when examined and checked. Offering 'answers' is moot if they can't be factually verified and shown to be true. Think of it like fake news. Just because someone says it, doesn't make it so. Pastafarianism claims that global warming is a result of the decline of the number of pirates. They offered an answer, so should we just accept it without doing the due diligence to see if their 'answer' checks out?
DeleteSo you say
ReplyDelete"The simple fact is that a wooden vessel constructed as described in the Bible simply wouldn't have worked. "
The bible says
This is how you are to build it: The ark
is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and
45 feet high.
Make a roof for it and finish the ark to
within 18 inches of the top. Put a door in
the side of the ark and make lower,
middle and upper decks.
I wonder if you could explain how this is enough information to tell you that it wouldn't work being as there is no detail of how to construct the vessel?
would you have believed that 52,000 tons of iron would float if there were no titanic?
bearing in mind that anyone can gain access to the plans of how the titanic was built but no one knows for sure how the Arc may have been built?
The reason why I have no problem with an iron ship that weighs tons floating is because the engineering is proven and demonstrated thoroughly. While we are on the subject of engineering, you do realize that the historical origins of large wooden ship building didn't come about until thousands of years after the supposed time of Noah, right? So I'm expected to believe that Noah build the first large wooden vessel with no prior knowledge to draw upon, and then didn't pass any of that knowledge along so that people thousands of years later had to figure it all out for themselves? He just lucked into the right framing and structure to compensate to all the stresses of the open sea (and with the most violent storm ever, no less)? All the while history shows no such naval sophistication either 'pre flood' or 'post flood'.
DeleteAs for the Ark not working... I can't remember where I read it, but engineers took those dimensions and those dimensions alone to see it it would be structurally sound. The short answer is that it wasn't. This was the standard used since space would have been at more than a premium on the Ark. Maximize the space using the Biblical instructions and it fails. They made it kind-of work with just wood (although using methods that also didn't exist yet) but there was a huge problem with making the Ark a seafaring vessel... The capacity for storing animals was slashed dramatically. So much so that even your lower count of animals wouldn't come anywhere close to fitting. In fact, there wasn't much room left at all. Oh, and it still leaked.
Not to mention that taking 81 years to build the Ark would have been very problematic in those days (especially with no experience), and that the viability of the wood would greatly decrease long before 81 years had passed.
Also, the longest wooden ships ever built came in at about 100 feet shorter than the Ark. These ships that were a little over 300 feet long had the benefit of generations of shipbuilding experience, required iron strapping, and still flexed so much that they required constant pumping to remove all the sea water that had leaked in.
So in the preponderance of all these facts, I find it literally unbelievable that a 600 year old man with no knowledge to draw upon build a boat that even the best minds of today couldn't make work given the materials and methods available, while still fulfilling it's stated duty.
But lets remember one thing... None of this really matters because there is absolutely no evidence that there was a global flood, and all the other points I made in my prior reply is damning evidence that it never happened at all.
-Brain Hulk
i think that a good counterpoint to that so used frase could be: "the great temnple of jerusalem was built by believer, and the great temple of teotihuacan was built by pagans"
Delete