Noah's Ark

How long can an olive tree live under water?

The only person who treated this topic with the respect it deserved is set. Since this is a purely mythic response to a mythical flood, Noah would have taken all animals (Bible didnt say anything about plants and most plants can raft seeds , so theyd be ok for a measly 100 days or so (according to Darwins experiments). So, if we honor the Creationists thinking that ALL the animals were created in one week (evolution allows them to appar at different time but were not talking sense here). SO

According to RAup (EXtinction, Bad luck or bad genes): Cuppy (How to become Extinct):Erwin and Wilson, (Biodiversity)- about 40 million SPECIES exist today. However, that is dwarfed by the number of up to 50 BILLION that lived at one time or another during geological time. SO, we see 50 Billion species , and since they had to be contemporaneously "Created", Noah had his round-up skills severely tested.

Im sure RL has some anwer that is simple, straightforward, and dead wrong


RL, what the hell is a "kind"?? not much attempt at any detail there.

pauli girlThats how Noah first came up with calamatta olives, they were dunked in the alkali seawaters and ta da, made for a martini.

fm wrote-



That's incorrect.

The only person who treated this topic with respect is dadpad.

The rest of it is coming from an alien perspective standing above and outside.

What's your explanation fm that out of 50 billion "species" ( a figure plucked out of the air no doubt) only the one, humans, had a story stemming from a felt need to have one and the art to express it.

The term "species" is a circularity isn't it?

Whenever Noah'sArk is mentioned I have no alternative but to reach for Eddie Izzard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFdmG-TRxzE

Pretty narrow existence you've got there fresco.

What do you reach for when lingerie is mentioned?

fm reaches for a darkened, soundproof room.

For you spendi THEME SONG FOR HIMSELF

That's about right fm. The twighlight is a Faustian place. Don't you know your Rembrandt. The ambience of the imagination. The Gothic dreamtime. Whence we came.

Noah is yesterday's cold potatoes.

That's quite a range.

And a good demonstration of why I've said that you treat the term in an arbitrary manner which makes it nearly useless.

A species is whatever you decide it is at the moment, right?

a kind has no meaning at all, so whats yer beef?
You have no any explanation that brings together the evidence that billions of significantly different morphologies of animals existed through time. You, would believe that they all lived together and interbred and formed loose cohorts called "kinds" (without any sense of meaning at all). Then, these same kinds saw fit to die in a nice stratigraphic/temporal series of sequences so that Creationists could waffle over what that means in light of Genesis. Ye, lets go get a bucket of steam.

It's posts like this, spendi, that lead me to believe you're an AI program cleverly designed by some University.

Bite me clown. I've posted literally tens of thousands of words at this site to explain just exactly why the entire flood story is and only can be so much bullshit. I really don't give a rat's ass if it passes by above the limits of your comprehension. I'm not going to reprise the entire critique every time some dull-witted thread is started once again on this silly, silly story.

Vengo wrote-



It's posts like that Vengo that lead me to believe you're a D6 program cleverly designed by some manufacturer of blinkers.

"Look out kid, they keep it all hid."

There's a chap reported in our papers who made a solemn vow that he was undeserving of marriage until he got a PhD in theoretical physics. 40 years he has tried but has so far eluded capture.

Re: Noah's Ark


it does say 2 of each "kind", which is commonly interpreted as species or genus. and creationists, who presumably base their assertions on Biblical text, generally maintain that "macroevolution", ie. evolution resulting in speciation, has never occurred, so they must have some definition of species in mind in order to deny that species arise through evolution.



but "kind" must have an unambiguous meaning, if one is a Biblical literalist.

Ignoring the many textually obscure passages, which can be said to constitute contradictions, there is a short list of reasons why this is a bullshit story:

Noah, his wife and his sons and their wives were geezers. Noah is said to 600 years old (and in a contradiction, another passage describes him as being in his six hundredth year, which would make him 599 going on 600--these jokers always have a hard time keeping the story straight). Now, either Noah and his main squeeze had produced their children at an extremely advanced age in order for his sons and their wives to repopulate the planet, which stretches credulity; or his sons and their wives repopulated the planet when they themselves were at an extremely advanced age, which stretches credulity as much or more.

The dimensions for the craft given are in proportions which would almost guarantee that the vessel would founder in the first storm it encountered, if it didn't break it's back before hand from the weight of the cargo--and it was allegedly launched in the midst of a storm which lasted for more than a month. The dimensions given, in a ratio of 30:5:3, length to breadth to "height" (a completely un-nautical description of the dimensions of a vessel), describe a vessel which is not likely to be seaworthy even in a slight swell, never mind a storm, and one which will either start her hull (this means the planks separate at the seams and water pours in) or break her back or both. It describes a vessel which will require at a minimum almost a hundred people to sail it effectively, but it does not describe the vessel having either sails or sweeps, and it has a crew of eight male and female geezers.

I have several times compared the putative ark to the American frigate U. S. S. Constitution, because the dimensions of that frigate are easy to find and link on line. Constitution was constructed from more than 2000 full-grown trees, most of it oak. Apart from having no clear idea what "gopher wood" is (biblical "scholars" argue over that one constantly), it is preposterous to allege that four geezers (or eight if you include the women folk) could have felled more than 2000 trees--the vessel described is larger than Constitution, regardless of what dimension has been alleged for a cubit--shaped them, and fit them into a seaworthy vessel without any prior experience of ship building. Wyoming, the largest wooden sailing ship ever built in historical times, was 450 feet from the tip of the jib boom to the tip of the spanker boom, which means that as "the Ark" was not rigged, Wyoming was still smaller than the ark, if a cubit is as little as 18" in length (some "authorities" claim a cubit is 20" or even 22", making the alleged Ark even larger). Wyoming was so long that it was subject to constant hogging and starting, and required a steam-powered pump running "24-7" to keep it's hold sufficiently free of water so as not to founder. Nevertheless, in 1924, Wyoming foundered in heavy seas and was lost with all hands. Yet this "Ark" is alleged to have survived more than a month of constant storm in an ocean that covered the planet to a depth of 15 cubits (22.5 to 27.5 feet, depending on whose description of a cubit one uses) above the tops of the tallest mountains. I've explained in detail elsewhere what kind of seas can be expected under those circumstances by reference to the Southern Ocean, where the groundswell girdles the planet unobstructed. So, the geezer crew not only has to work whatever sails or sweeps were needed to keep her head into the wind, they had to pump or bail like Billy-be-damned into the bargain--never mind feeding the menagerie and shoveling ****.

The text of Genesis calls for all the food for the people and animals to have been taken on board, and calls for seven pair of each clean beast, and two pair of each unclean beast. Even with the most stupid definition of what each beast refers to that the member "real life" can imagine, there is simply no way a vessel so small could ever have held the animals and the necessary fodder--despite the fact that the text describes a vessel of preposterous proportions and a vessel preposterously large.

These clowns put a "door" in the side, for the convenience of loading and unloading the beasts, one supposes--that's what the text implies.

You might come up with a taller tale--but you'd have to work awfully damned hard.

I'm sure FM can, if he chooses, canvass all the geological arguments against a claim that such a flood took place at any time in the last 6000 years.

Set, to give the Bible its due, this story may have some basis in fact. An actual family might have evaded a flash flood by loading all its belongings, including livestock, on a large vessel, and their adventure subsequently embellished into a myth. But as an explanation for the evidence of mass extinctions in the fossil record, it falls far short.

It's a pity Settin' that you expend your energies, such as they are, on being incredulous at human credulity being stretched. What a windmill to tilt at.

The trillion dollar US beauty industry is sufficient evidence that human credulity is infinitely extensible.

Chill Set, I was ribbing you.

That why I didn't put this in R&S, it was more wondering how much space all those animals would take up, and wondering how people would respond if they knew how impossible it was.

Which people Chai? I have responded to the story. So has dadpad.

Are you just looking for those people who will respond in a manner that allows you to ridicule them?

We all know it was impossible.

In 3000 years they will laugh at how the motor industry was developed to allow gas, a bi-product actually, to be disposed of in a socially acceptable manner.

In Brave New World they would have laughed, if Mr Huxley had thought of it, at how reproduction was managed in suburban breeding hutches known as houses.

There's a certain disrespect for our forbears on this thread which I find a trifle distasteful in the absence of a disrespect for ourselves. As if we are some special slice of humanity superior to all others.

Give it 3000 years and they'll be laughing at mashing potatoes and pegging the washing out.

Cassius says (according to Billy Bob Shakespeare): "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

The problem here is not that the story may be an embellishment of an earlier legendary account of a significant flood (there are several candidates for the "honor"). The problem is that the bible-thumpers insist that the account--a confused, repetitive and contradictory story which also happens to be preposterous--is an actual, factual account of an event which not only took place, but in which the entire planet was flooded. It is the insistence upon swallowing whole a horseshit story as "gospel truth" simply because it appears in scripture to which i object, and i object upon the basis of the glaring implausibility.