Couldn’t many of the same things be said about Noah’s Ark? I’ve heard atheist raise many of the same objections about Noah’s Ark. Our reply is that the Lord can accomplish any miracle he needs. How did Christ turn water into wine? Just because the human mind can’t conceive of how he did that in an instant means it could not have been done? What the human mind can’t grasp, God can nonetheless achieve. And none of the scriptures provide us with all the details for how these things occured, including how Noah in so short a time could have gathered up nearly every animal species known to man including poisonous and deadly animals like cobras, hippos, lions, etc., and then stored all the many, many different kinds of food these animals would have required and the water needed to hydrate them. Faith is not exclusive of science, or even what we might call “reason,” but neither is it disproven by it. God works in ways man’s mind can’t always wrap itself around.
No one knows what the mysterious substance was from which God had Noah construct the Ark. I sometimes speculate that the Ark was like Aslan’s Barn, a sort of “pocket universe” — something bigger on the inside than on the outside.
There's lots of speculation about Noah's ark. I don't recall anyone claiming that the Noah story was copied from golden plates given to a guy in upstate NY.
There ARE some artifacts that seem to fit the ark. Let us know when the Jaredite barges produce artifacts.
Yes, but that only means that both stories are not literal but allegorical. If you look at them you will see that they can't be real. We today - the whole civilization, if you wish - probably can't build a boat that would house every animal, plant and insect species for a year. We likely can't gather them all either, and we can't guarantee that they won't die during the trip - even though today we know a lot about animals of Earth. Noah would not know what most of the animals eat (we still don't know that about some species,) and it would be tough for him to travel (how?) to Americas, Europe and Australia and Antarctica to catch all that wildlife. If the God was seriously helping Noah with all that work then why to bother with Noah - his merely human efforts would be invisible on that scale.
Our reply is that the Lord can accomplish any miracle he needs.
It's a deus ex machina answer. It is certainly possible that a deity is capable of miracles, but in this case they are inefficiently placed. For example, instead of flooding the Earth with water (which the deity has to borrow somewhere and then return) it would be far more practical to spread a virus that kills only humans, and give the vaccine to a few chosen. You don't even need divine powers to do that.