Beats me, but they don't spend all day caring for them.
How many keepers would it need if *everything* had to be done by hand?
Um, just about everything is done by hand.
No fresh water in pipes. No automatic removal of waste.
Why not? It was raining, so the ark could have a plumbing system fed by rains to bring in fresh water and swab the decks.
No trucks to drive food around. Dumb waiters to bring up straw and such from the hold would work, along with hand carts.
Just the 20,000,000 species aboard
Not every species in the world was aboard, only those that could not survive a temporarily aquatic environment - land animals and birds.
And your space figure doesn't allow for storage space for fresh food
Would have been in the hold below the decks.
and water
It was raining. All the water needed was readily available.
And since you brought fish up did Noah carry the freshwater fish on the ark or the saltwater fish?
The Bible does not include any fish upon the ark. It might be readily supposed that the freshwater fish at that time could live in either environment, as Salmon do today.
but in that case how long would it have been until the land was fertile after the water receded
The land was apparently fertile soon after, as the dove came back with an olive branch.
Why did God hide all the physical evidence that this event ever happened
The sedimentary rock layers around the world, which evolutionists say were laid down at high elevations by shallow seas, seem like pretty good evidence to me of widespread flooding. Similarly, the congregations of animal bones in caves at high elevations are pretty good evidence to me.
Once the animals landed every predation event for the first few months would represent an extinction, and carnivores need lots of prey to eat.
The fast breeding animals would have provided enough meat for the relatively few species of carnivores. However, perhaps what you say is a good explanation for why the carnivores like sabertooth tigers and the like went extinct at that time.
And all this so that God (an infinitely powerful being) could kill everyone-8 in the world in a moronic way that required millions of miracles,
There is nothing moronic about it. The event was not only to wipe out a sinful world, but to teach a symbol of the salvation now available by Baptism (the flood) in the one Church (the ark), where humanity is guided by the Dove (the Holy Spirit).
a way that just happens to match exactly the myths that you'd expect early hydraulic civilisations to tell.
So what sort of civilization then predicts the final destruction of the world as a conflagaration by fire?
How can people take this stuff seriously?
Because every people all the way around the world tells the same story??? Did they all make it up and coordinate it via telepathy? No, they clearly all experienced the trauma of the event.
First, the date of the global flood:
2252 BC -- layevangelism.com
2304 BC -- Answers in Genesis (+/- 11 years).
2350 BC -- Morris, H. Biblical Creationism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1993.
Second, at that age we are not dealing with "sedimentary rock layers around the world." We are dealing with soils, common dirt.
Those soils contain a lot of evidence about what occurred while they were being laid down, starting with whether they was wind- or water-deposited.
The soils also contain a record of human occupation. That can be dated by multiple methods, including radiocarbon dating. That method has been shown to be quite accurate, and the claims made against it by young earthers have been shown to be inaccurate. Radiocarbon dating is supplemented by a variety of other methods.
In the western US, we have a continuous record of human occupation going back past 10,000 years. The faunal and floral record can be traced back much farther. There are no breaks in this record which would coincide with a global flood.
One telling piece of evidence is the mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA). There is a good record of Native American DNA from prior to 5,000 years, and after 4,000 years. The haplogroups and mutations match.
If there was a flood, then the groups in the western US would have been wiped out, and quickly replaced by other groups. The mtDNA would be distinctly different, before and after. This is not the case. The mtDNA can be traced from its origins in Africa to the New World, by multiple routes. There is no evidence at all that the entire sequence was terminated and replaced from a different source.
Now, there have been some good floods in the western US. The channeled scablands of eastern Washington state came from a series of late Ice Age floods. The boundaries of these events are known, as are the dates. They left a pretty clear signature in the soils. If a global flood had occurred, it would have left a huge signature in the soils, and the dullest of archaeological students would be able to see it. It would be in all the textbooks and in every back yard. There is no such evidence.
If you have any specific comments on this, please let me know. But don't bother with the creationist pages, as most of them are still hung up on fossils and the geological column, when what we are really dealing with are soils.
A lot more than 8 is the answer you were looking for. And that is for the tiny number of species in a zoo.
How many keepers would it need if *everything* had to be done by hand? Um, just about everything is done by hand.
No it isn't. They carry everything around in trucks or flatbeds. water and sewage are moved around with powered systems. THey have power hoses for cleaning. All they do by hand is throw the food to the animals.
No fresh water in pipes. No automatic removal of waste. Why not? It was raining, so the ark could have a plumbing system fed by rains to bring in fresh water and swab the decks.
Accepting the incredible plumbing ability you are proposing in a bronze-age culture, that only gets the water *in*. Every bit that comes in has to go out again. Including everything that went down to the lowest decks which is where the largest animals would need to be for stability. Tons of liquid and slurry sewage would need to be removed daily, from the single small hole in the ark. That means it both has to be moved inside the ark to the correct place, and lifted up to the hole before it can be removed. The bible describes the ark as "sealed" apart from the single small hole, so how did this water system you are proposing let the water in?
No trucks to drive food around. Dumb waiters to bring up straw and such from the hold would work, along with hand carts.
The walkways for these handcarts and dumb-waiter hoists are going to take up a huge proportion of your interior space. While we are about it don't forget that it would be completely dark inside, 100% humidity, the heat from all the creatures would be incredible, no way for fresh air to move around inside the ark (unless you are also proposing to fill it aluminium ducting for a bronze-age aircon system.
Just the 20,000,000 species aboard. Not every species in the world was aboard, only those that could not survive a temporarily aquatic environment - land animals and birds.
So all the insects just flew for a whole year without food, did they?
And your space figure doesn't allow for storage space for fresh food Would have been in the hold below the decks.
The lowest deck *is* the hold. It is just a matter of nomenclature. THe hold obviously has to be part of the internals of the ship. You don't think it just possible that the tons of urine and faeces slopping about continuously might mitigate a little against storing a year's supply of food in 100% humidity?
and water It was raining. All the water needed was readily available.
OK. But that doesn't remove the need to remove the urine.
And since you brought fish up did Noah carry the freshwater fish on the ark or the saltwater fish? The Bible does not include any fish upon the ark. It might be readily supposed that the freshwater fish at that time could live in either environment, as Salmon do today.
What do you mean, "the fresh water fish at that time". I thought you people didn't believe in evolution. Where has the huge variety of modern freshwater fish that cannot tolerate saltwater come from in the last 4500 years? (Indeed much faster than that, no-one has noticed an explosion of fresh-water fish varieties in recorded history, so they all appeared in the first 1000 years after the ark) We aren't talking about a few hours. we are talking about immersion in innappropriate salinity for a year.
but in that case how long would it have been until the land was fertile after the water receded The land was apparently fertile soon after, as the dove came back with an olive branch.
Indeed. How could this be? Not only fertility but grown olive trees apparently. Yet there would be no topsoil (which requires earthworms by the trillion per square mile) and the land would be poisoned by being thick with salt.
Why did God hide all the physical evidence that this event ever happened? The sedimentary rock layers around the world, which evolutionists say were laid down at high elevations by shallow seas, seem like pretty good evidence to me of widespread flooding. Similarly, the congregations of animal bones in caves at high elevations are pretty good evidence to me.
THey are pretty good evidence if you don't examine the detail of the finds. You are in disagreement with pretty much every geologist who has troubled to examine the evidence. The early geologists who examined the evidence, creationists to a man, found no evidence for a *global* flood. Read Sedgewick's retirement address. He was one of the last hold-outs.
Once the animals landed every predation event for the first few months would represent an extinction, and carnivores need lots of prey to eat. The fast breeding animals would have provided enough meat for the relatively few species of carnivores. However, perhaps what you say is a good explanation for why the carnivores like sabertooth tigers and the like went extinct at that time.
Fast breeding? Don't make me laugh. Predators need prey to outmass them thousands to one to avoid annihallating the prey population. Killing the young would be almost as bad as killing the parents if not worse. Each young killed would represent much less food, and be killing the future potential expansion. No way can you make the numbers on this stack up.
And all this so that God (an infinitely powerful being) could kill everyone-8 in the world in a moronic way that required millions of miracles, There is nothing moronic about it. The event was not only to wipe out a sinful world, but to teach a symbol of the salvation now available by Baptism (the flood) in the one Church (the ark), where humanity is guided by the Dove (the Holy Spirit).
That's what the whole story is. A symbol. God didn't need to kill everything in the world by mimicing a natural catastrophe using trillions of large and small miracles. God could just make every sinful *human* in the world drop dead in his tracks.
a way that just happens to match exactly the myths that you'd expect early hydraulic civilisations to tell. So what sort of civilization then predicts the final destruction of the world as a conflagaration by fire?
Probably one that lives in an earthquake or volcano zone.
How can people take this stuff seriously? Because every people all the way around the world tells the same story??? Did they all make it up and coordinate it via telepathy? No, they clearly all experienced the trauma of the event.
If you want to know why practically every early civilisation (most of which were coastal or lived near great rivers) has stories of a flood in which nearly everyone died then check it out with the citizens of S Louisiana, and then imagine Katrina hitting a community with no flood defence, no weather forecasting, no emergency services. What is interesting is that those cultures that didn't emerge by the sea or on great rivers *don't* have stories of nearly everyone being killed in a flood. Funny that.