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Thursday, August 23, 2007

elbogz on the capacity of Noah's ark

Elbogz, one of my most faithful commenters, mistakenly left a long comment on this post, when he meant to leave it on this one. His comment was related to the question of whether dinosaurs are still alive or not. I have decided to copy his comment, without change (except to add asterisks) as a post, using a different color to indicate quotation:

The young earth creationist arguments are as useful to the church as the argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I disagree with your statement Just because young-earth creationists claim something is true doesn't make it false.”

I’ve yet to read anything from a young earth creationist that is even remotely true*; and that to me, that is the true sin. When have to lie about the world in order to believe in God, then what?

The kids in the church now sing, “Behemoth” was a dinosaur and realize one day these children will read a real science book are realize the church lied to them, and walk away. Look at the recent statistics published that show a mass exodus of children from the church when they reach college.

Noah’s ark is always the biggest lie of all. Let’s assume for the sake of my rant here, that what the young earth creationist say is true. The ark contained 15,500 “kinds” of animals**, (including dinosaurs) and the average size was that of a sheep. The ark contained one window, and 8 people. Each person would have to feed 1938 animals a day. They were tough biblical people that worked 16 hours a day. They would have to feed 121 animals an hour or about one animal every 30 seconds. Sheep eat about 25 pounds of hay a day so each person would have to lift and move 1.5 tons of hay per hour.

Oh, wait, there is the poop. Now most of us don’t have a couple of sheep to observe, but lets take 2 large dogs. Now if we scoop up the poop of those two large dogs, and then throw it off the ark, and assume a sheep poops about 5 pounds a day, then each person has to shovel about 9690 pounds of poop a day, carry it up to the one window and throw it out.

Perhaps they left the poop on the Ark. Here is my scientific experiment on the poop problem. Take 2 large dogs. Scoop the poop of those 2 dogs for one year. Take the poop inside your home and live with it. You are allowed to open one window.

Now that said and done, why, oh why do we do this dance? It all leads to confusion and leads us away from God.

*It is clear, from this and other comments he (?) has made, that elbogz had a crisis of faith, and that young-earth creationism was part of this. I suppose that what he meant to say here is that all the claims of young-earth creationism are false. I hope he would agree that, if, for example, a young-earth creationist said that Jupiter was the largest planet, or that Jesus is God, these wouldn't be false.

**In a subsequent comment, elbogz says that he found this number in a book by Henry Morris. I believe he found the suggestion of a sheep as equivalent to the average size in Morris, also.

I post this, not because I would have said it, but in fairness to elbogz, and also because I do plan to produce a post myself on questions about Noah's flood. I have a number of them, which, in my opinion, point out weaknesses in all the Biblical interpretations of this event. Perhaps next time. The comment quoted above qualifies as a question, too.

Thanks, elbogz! Thank you for reading.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you Martin. You have a kind way of treating my flame-throwing internet rant.

Martin LaBar said...

I hope so.