Dear Pastor Sid,
I was reading the verses in Genesis and the story of the Noah and the Ark. I was wondering: how did he fit all the animals on the Ark? The Ark was not big enough for all the animals was it? — Martha in Walkertown
Hi Martha in Walkertown,
The Ark was about 500 feet long and about three stories high. It was build with three decks and thousands of square feet for storage and cages for animals. Go and visit the Ark Encounter in northern Kentucky if you get the chance. So what about the animals? All of the animals were not required to enter the Ark, only some of them. And the Genesis account refers to “kinds” of animals. “Kinds” means species, and there are only about 7,000 different specials of animals. Canines or dogs is a species, and so is felines or the cat families. But only two dogs, a male and female, entered the Ark. And all the dogs that exists now came from those two dogs. Likewise with all the species. It is speculated that the Ark could have held around 50,000 animals. Keep in mind that baby dogs, giraffes, and dinosaurs, would have been on the Ark, so the cages were still pretty small. This also means that each person on board (8 total) would have cared daily for about 6250 animals. Can you imagine?
— Sid Stewart, pastor of Hoover’s Grove Wesleyan Church, as reported by Yes! Weekly
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Wow. Only 7,000 species of animals. I’m gonna hate breaking it to the 5.5 million species of insects, 6,500 of mammals and 11,000 of birds. That’s just the beginning. It’s amazing how delusional people can still sound sane.
nope, they only needed two insects, two mammals, and two birds – a “kind” of animal.
presumably they had two dinosaurs, as well, because dinosaurs are a different “kind” of animal than birds… 😉
all subsequent generations of animals are related to those two, on the ark… all 5.6 million of them! 🤣
delusional doesn’t even come close! 🤯
Make sense, since every human who has ever lived traces back to the first humans, Adam and Eve. 🤣🤣
I was a young earth creationist until my late 40s. I’m so embarrassed that I not only believed these things, but I also taught thousands of people to do the same. 😢😢
I was illiterate regarding science. No need for it, I had God’s science textbook, the King James Bible. 😢😢
🤣🤣🤣🤣✅
Also, what did the carnivorous animals eat during that lengthy boat ride?
Well, according to my late 1980s “bible college” teacher, those carnivorous animals were all baby / infant carnivorous animals. So, they were incapable of eating other animals… because they were babies / infants.
Logical conclusion: they drank milk, silly skeptics.
I’m not making this shit up.
In my Fundamentalist circle, it was commonly believed God put many of the animals in stasis. Those hungry carnivores slept through their boat ride. 🤣🤣
Row, row, row that boat…
When I was a child, I had a toy ark, and lots of plastic animals to go in it. The ark was a boat-shaped bucket with a top that had a wheelhouse. But loading animals into a plastic boat was boring, so I soon established personalities for the animals, and had them interact with each other. The boat was storage for my toys. Eventually it got discarded in favor of a much more compact plastic bag, and I carried my characters around. I played with them on the bank of a lake, while my mother threw two lines in to catch fish, and annoyed her by my unwillingness to pay attention to my line. Waiting for some catfish to find my bait was terminally boring to me. That I might eat it was irrelevant; I didn’t really like catfish, though it would’ve bought me a boatload of pain to admit that to my mother. It wasn’t repulsive like overcooked cauliflower, which I did refuse to eat.
When our children were young, Polly’s Dad made the kids a wooden ark, complete with hand cut/painted animals and people. We still have the ark. The grandkids play with it now. The animals in the ark had many names over the years. As with your childhood, Noah, Mrs. Noah, and the animals took on a life of their own — a simple toy that gave our children a lot of enjoyment.❤️❤️
Here’s a picture of the ark:
https://brucegerencser.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/noahs-ark.jpg
While creationists criticize evolution as being impossible on one hand, the Ken Ham explanation of “kinds” on the ark to save space, with evolution occuring at a frantic rate after the flood is actually absurd at the time scales required to make the ark story true.
“This also means that each person on board (8 total) would have cared daily for about 6250 animals. Can you imagine?”
Can I imagine? Yes. It’s only an imagination and fantasy, not reality.
And I thought New York apartments are cramped!
Baby dinosaurs? So, what happened to the dinosaurs after the flood? 🤔 By the way, there are 2 unicorns entering the ark in the post painting. The horses are on the bottom of the picture. I thought unicorns died in the flood? Or was that just a silly song?
The You Tube channel “Holy Koolaid” posted a couple of very good videos about the fallacy of a literal reading of the Noah’s Ark story. One of them talks about the conditions on board if you just take a minimal number of animals. Basically neither the animals nor the humans would survive long on the boat, much less for a year. And then of course you throw in Dinosaurs if you’re Ken Ham. If you have a T-Rex on board, everything and everybody gets eaten in the first few days. And finally, the carcass and shat filled ark that can neither float nor keep the water out comes to rest somewhere in North Central Kentucky..you know, maybe Joseph Smith was on to something after all..
I find it interesting that all kinds of modern theories get used to explain how God somehow made this happen despite the logical roadblocks to the literal story- he put the animals in “stasis” like in the movies “The Matrix” and “Aliens” (for space travel)..there was a modern conveyor system to dispose of all the animal waste..he made the predators eat grain..he initiated a mass evolutionary event once the animals were back on dry land like the “Genesis project” in “Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan” (aka the best Trek ever). Funny how evangelicals seem to reference material from sci-fi movies often times to help give modern explanations to ancient stories from the Old Testament. Bruce, I may be on to something here..
Personally, I believe there probably was an ancient flood in the Middle East that may have been the result of a meteor impact over a glacier, or some other triggering event that released a large amount of water onto a semi arid area. Folks who had boats may have had some inkling of what was about to happen, and were able to load their livestock and family on board, while other people drowned without much warning. To the ancient people who had no knowledge of meteors, glaciers, geology, etc, this event would very much look like the work of a higher power like God. After these events, it is natural for the survivors to make a moral inventory of why they survived and the others did not. I would speculate there are a lot of emotions that folks deal with, even in modern times when we understand how floods and tornadoes form. So imaging the ancient mind trying to make sense of what happened. Eventually this gets passed down as the flood story.
I foster kittens, usually 3-4 week old gruel babies. It takes about an hour a day just to do the morning round: first feeding, clean out the sleep area, change litter, mop. There are several more feedings throughout the day, plus constant litterbox scooping, cleaning them up after every meal, laundry, etc. So no. There would be horrible neglect even if there were only 100 animals. Of course, when you bring up practicalities they’ll usually brush it off with a “God provided supernatural intervention.”