Posted on 04/04/2014 11:57:01 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Noah’s Ark could have floated even with two of every land animal in the world packed inside, scientists have calculated.
Although researchers are unsure if all the creatures could have squeezed into the huge vessel, they are confident it would have handled the weight of 70,000 animals without sinking.
A group of master’s students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Leicester University studied the exact dimensions of the Ark, set out in Genesis 6:13-22.
According to The Bible, God instructed Noah to build a boat that was 300 cubits long 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high — recommending that it be constructed from gopher wood. The students averaged out the Egyptian and Hebrew cubit measurement to come up with 48 centimetres, making the Ark around 144 metres long.
Using those dimensions, the Archimedes principle of buoyancy and the approximate weight of various animals, they were surprised to discover that the Ark could have floated.
Benjamin Jordan, 21, a student from Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, said: “Using the dimensions of the Ark and the density of the water, we were able to calculate its buoyancy force, which, according to Archimedes’s principle, is equal to the weight of the volume of fluid the object displaces. This meant we were then able to estimate the total mass the Ark could support before the gravitational weight would overcome the buoyancy force, causing the Ark to sink.”
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalpost.com ...
And since that would still not allow carrying enough food, and only involves 35,000 species (not quite), and there are millions of species today, it’s not literally true.
and not just 40 days and nights, over seven months.
Beyond that I think it is a parable. I believe it reveals God’s truth, i.e. God’s message, but is not 100% historically true. Truth can be revealed through art.
Perhaps ... but that answer sounds like a cop out. If the answer is God magically protected the animals he could have done that without an ark and all this trouble. He could have parted the waters. In fact God could have skipped the flood all together and just magically killed the humans via some virus that somehow spared the animals.
A more likely answer is the animals were placed in separate stalls in the ark by kind. That’s what I always assumed Noah did. A lot of work but building such an ark is a lot of work.
Exactly. The food need by most animals needs to be fresh. How did the food stay fresh? An elephant needs 42 gallons of fresh water, and 600 lbs of food a day. Put together all the animals, there is no way to carry that much fresh water or food.
Let’s not forget, someone has to feed the animals. Even if Noah’s family slept in shifts so that someone could always be feeding them, they still managed to provide new food to 2,500 animals an hour— meaning it took less than a second and a half to feed each one.
Not necessarily the set of “species” we have now, but definitely representatives of every “kind” present at the time of Noah.
The reason he didn’t insert himself in another means and won’t for the future is that he believes in free will - the ability of humans to determine their own fate. He wants us to choose the correct path, but leaves it to us to make the decision. Early in the process he determined the need to be more determinitive, but has since offered other options.
Your viewpoint is based in what man can achieve and not what God is able to achieve. To imply what you imagine can’t be achieved (or overcome) by God is you limiting God by your own imagination. Nothing we can think or dream limits what God is able to do.
How about mosquitos, ticks etc?
How about useless dangerous eating machines like crocks and gators?
Mosquitos are food for birds, bats, frogs, toads etc... Ticks are food for chickens and guineas and may play a part in the population control of some animal groups.
If you use Google I’m sure you’ll find some useful purpose for crocks and gators.
I uestion your tagline!
Thanks :)
Whatever floats yer boat....erhh ...
And assuming Adam and Eve were caucasian, how is it that their genes would have allowed the creation of a black race on the continent of Africa?
RE: Inbreeding and genetic defects.
Here is the answer from the creationist perspective...
In Genesis 5:4 we read a statement that sums up the life of Adam and Eve: “After he begot Seth, the days of Adam were eight hundred years; and he had sons and daughters.”
During their lives, Adam and Eve had a number of male and female children. In fact, the Jewish historian Josephus wrote, “The number of Adam’s children, as says the old tradition, was thirty-three sons and twenty-three daughters.”
Scripture doesn’t tell us how many children were born to Adam and Eve, but considering their long life spans (Adam lived for 930 years—Genesis 5:5), it would seem logical to suggest there were many. Remember, they were commanded to “be fruitful, and multiply” (Genesis 1:28).
If we now work totally from Scripture, without any personal prejudices or other extrabiblical ideas, then back at the beginning, when there was only the first generation, brothers would have had to marry sisters or there wouldn’t have been any more generations!
We’re not told when Cain married or many of the details of other marriages and children, but we can say for certain that Cain’s wife was either his sister or a close relative.
A closer look at the Hebrew word for “wife” in Genesis reveals something readers may miss in translation. It was more obvious to those speaking Hebrew that Cain’s wife was likely his sister. (There is a slim possibility that she was his niece, but either way, a brother and sister would have married in the beginning.) The Hebrew word for “wife” used in Genesis 4:17 (the first mention of Cain’s wife) is ishshah, and it means “woman/wife/female.”
And Cain knew his wife [ishshah], and she conceived and bore Enoch. And he built a city, and called the name of the city after the name of his son—Enoch (Genesis 4:17).
The word ishshah is the word for “woman,” and it means “from man.” It is a derivation of the Hebrew words ‘iysh (pronounced: eesh) and enowsh, which both mean “man.” This can be seen in Genesis 2:23 where the name “woman” (ishshah) is given to one who came from Adam.
And Adam said: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman [ishshah], because she was taken out of Man [iysh]” (Genesis 2:23).
Thus, Cain’s wife is a descendant of Adam/man. Therefore, she had to be his sister (or possibly niece). Hebrew readers should be able to make this connection easier; however, much is lost when translated.
Many people immediately reject the conclusion that Adam and Eve’s sons and daughters married each other by appealing to the law against brother-sister marriage. Some say that you can’t marry your relation. Actually, if you don’t marry your relation, you don’t marry a human!
A wife is related to her husband before they are married because all people are descendants of Adam and Eve—all are of one blood. This law forbidding close relatives marrying was not given until the time of Moses (Leviticus 18–20). Provided marriage was one man for one woman for life (based on Genesis 1–2), there was no disobedience to God’s law originally (before the time of Moses) when close relatives (even brothers and sisters) married each other.
Remember that Abraham was married to his half-sister (Genesis 20:12).
God’s law forbade such marriages,9 but that was some four hundred years later at the time of Moses.
Today, brothers and sisters (and half-brothers and half-sisters, etc.) are not currently permitted by law to marry and have children.
Now it is true that children produced in a union between brother and sister have a greater chance to be deformed. As a matter of fact, the closer the couple are in relationship, the more likely it is that any offspring will be deformed. It is very easy to understand this without going into all the technical details.
Each person inherits a set of genes from his or her mother and father. Unfortunately, genes today contain many mistakes (because of sin and the Curse), and these mistakes show up in a variety of ways. For instance, people let their hair grow over their ears to hide the fact that one ear is lower than the other. Or perhaps someone’s nose is not quite in the middle of his or her face, or someone’s jaw is a little out of shape. Let’s face it, the main reason we call each other normal is because of our common agreement to do so!
The more closely related two people are, the more likely it is that they will have similar mistakes in their genes, inherited from the same parents. Therefore, brother and sister are likely to have similar mistakes in their genetic material. If there were to be a union between these two that produces offspring, children would inherit one set of genes from each of their parents. Because the genes probably have similar mistakes, the mistakes pair together and result in deformities in the children.
Conversely, the further away the parents are in relationship to each other, the more likely it is that they will have different mistakes in their genes. Children, inheriting one set of genes from each parent, are likely to end up with some of the pairs of genes containing only one bad gene in each pair. The good gene tends to override the bad so that a deformity (a serious one, anyway) does not occur. Instead of having totally deformed ears, for instance, a person may have only crooked ones. (Overall, though, the human race is slowly degenerating as mistakes accumulate generation after generation.)
However, this fact of present-day life did not apply to Adam and Eve. When the first two people were created, they were perfect. Everything God made was “very good” (Genesis 1:31).
That means their genes were perfect—no mistakes. But when sin entered the world because of Adam (Genesis 3:6), God cursed the world so that the perfect creation then began to degenerate, that is, suffer death and decay (Romans 8:22). Over a long period of time, this degeneration would have resulted in all sorts of mistakes occurring in the genetic material of living things.
But Cain was in the first generation of children ever born. He, as well as his brothers and sisters, would have received virtually no imperfect genes from Adam or Eve, since the effects of sin and the Curse would have been minimal to start with. In that situation, brother and sister could have married (provided it was one man for one woman, which is what marriage is all about, Matthew 19:4–6) without any potential to produce deformed offspring.
By the time of Moses (about 2,500 years later), degenerative mistakes would have accumulated to such an extent in the human race that it would have been necessary for God to bring in the laws forbidding brother-sister (and close relative) marriage (Leviticus 18–20).
(Also, there were plenty of people on the earth by now, and there was no reason for close relations to marry.)
In all, there appear to be three interrelated reasons for the introduction of laws forbidding close intermarriage:
As we have already discussed, there was the need to protect against the increasing potential to produce deformed offspring.
God’s laws were instrumental in keeping the Jewish nation strong, healthy, and within the purposes of God.
These laws were a means of protecting the individual, the family structure, and society at large. The psychological damage caused by incestuous relationships should not be minimized.
One of the reasons many people cannot answer the question about Cain’s wife is that they tend to look at today’s world and the problems that would be associated with close relations marrying, and they do not look at the clear historical record God has given to us.
They try to interpret Genesis from our present situation rather than understand the true biblical history of the world and the changes that have occurred because of sin. Because they are not building their worldview on Scripture but taking a secular way of thinking to the Bible, they are blinded to the simple answers.
Genesis is the record of the God who was there as history happened. It is the Word of One who knows everything and who is a reliable Witness from the past. Thus, when we use Genesis as a basis for understanding history, we can make sense of evidence which would otherwise be a real mystery.
You see, if evolution is true, science has an even bigger problem than Cain’s wife to explain—namely, how could man ever evolve by mutations (mistakes) in the first place, since that process would have made everyone’s children deformed? The mere fact that people can produce offspring that are not largely deformed is a testimony to creation, not evolution.
I appreciate you taking the time to explain that answer and forgive me if I say that the explanation sounds like it's merely an endorsement of a myth called Adam and Eve.....
To try to explain the unexplainable, you're bringing in divine intervention and I still can't come to accept that.
I can't argue it, I can't explain it and I certainly can't defend my statement other than by saying that I don't have the necessary FAITH that is required to be a believer in everything you have tried to say to me.......
If there is indeed a beginning and ultimately an ending, then what created God?
;)
He has the right to give life and to take it.
Yeah, I know, your atheistic beliefs are well known here. You're another one who isn't interested in answers. You think you have them all.
Good luck with that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.