Why do people try to claim that Noah's ark could not hold all the animals, when math shows that it could.?

Question

The ark was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. That is 1,518,750 cubic feet. That is the equivalent of 522 railroad box cars
Since there were only about 5,000 kinds of animals, and most are smaller then sheep, they would take about 1/3 of the space. Plenty of room left for food.
The ark took about 120 years to build, there was probably designated places for each animal, depending on its size. the mice and rabbits could be stacked.

For those that think that this is just a story written by illiterate shepherds, I have 2 more questions.
1) How could an illiterate write something?
2) The Ark is a 1:6 ratio. the same ratio used on ships today...
Did they just guess the right numbers?

Please do not try using the old line "Did he go to America and Australia to get the animals from there?" If you read the story, it says that he did not go get the animals, the animals came to the ark. They walked/hopped/slithered/flew. There was no America or Australia then.

Answer 1

People like to put GOD in a box, it makes it easier for them to cope & they do not strain their small

comprehension.

Answer 2

You’re wrong. You’re not taking into account the thickness of the hull, the floors that separated the lower, mid and upper decks, or the walls that separated the rooms (plus you have no idea how many rooms the ark had). The ark had three decks. The maximum square footage on each deck was 33,700 for a total of 101,205 square feet.



There are over 2 million distinct species on the planet today. There are over 5,000 distinct species of just mammals. If we concentrate on just mammals alone and we assume that half are clean we’re looking at 35,000 clean animals (7 pairs of each) and 5,000 unclean (1 pair each) for a total of 40,000 animals that had to be loaded into the ark. That leaves less than 3 square feet for each mammal.



Now add in a year’s worth of fodder and the rest of the animal kingdom and you end up with an ark that could not have possibly held all that it needed to.

Are you saying the great flood happened some 250 million years ago?



1) You do not need to write to be able to tell a story.

2) The most popular ships today are Panamax ships and their dimensions are 110 ft wide by 1050 ft long. A ratio of almost 9.54:1.



Try again.

Answer 3

A, There are more then 1 million species of Animals if 1 animal needed 1 sqm of living space, you need an ark the size of Hong Kong.



B. America and Australia were one of the oldest continent, just because men hasn't found it yet does not mean it does not exist.



C. There are no Standard ratio used on ships today.



D. 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high isn't very big. Even the world's smallest aircraft carrier, the Italian made "Giuseppe Garibaldi " is bigger then that. The USS George Washington is 1092 feet long, 257 feet wide and 244 feet tall. That makes it 2.5 time longer, 3.5 times wider and 5 times taller then Noak's ark. Even that cannot contain all the animals in the world. (Oh look, the ratio is 1:4, does that mean the USS George Washington should sink the first day it was commissioned?)



E. The stories were not WRITTEN by shepherds, it was passed down through words and stories, something like Chinese Whisper, then one fine day one person decided to pen it down on tree barks.

Answer 4

Sicne animals are evolving, this calculation is wrong. Chats are descending to others. Furthermore this animals need a lot of food and some special need, which need more, than only "plenty of room".



1) a literate can write by moving his hands. The story of the arc you can also find in babylonian myths, older than the bible.

2) Such ships are very old. They can got this size from real ships. If Noah was real, do you think, he has calibrated his ship? Where is the ark? Where are the marks of the flood? Why are there anly land living plants today?

Answer 5

Because math actually shows that they couldn't. Your numbers are way off. There were far more than 5000 kinds of animals, of which there were at least 2 and many times 7 of each kind. They would have filled the ark. Plus if you go with your 5000 kinds number, to reach the diversity of life we have achieved today in only a few thousand years since the flood, some strange crazy-fast super evolution would be necessary.



Furthermore, with eight people to take care of the animals, if they worked literally 24 hours a day, they would have only 15 seconds each day to spend on each animal. That is 15 seconds to feed, water, wash, and clean up after each individual animal. An impossibility even if all the animals fit.

Answer 6

So we just stack the animals away like boxes? There is a lot more math to it than taking the volume of the boat. Assume the ark had three levels and that it was a perfect rectangular prism shape (which it is not, it would have a smaller area than a rectangular box).



(45)(75)(3) = 10125 ft^2



If each animal took up only a square foot in space, then you would have a space smaller than my bedroom for storing all of the food, people, etc. But of course the actual area of the ship was likely much less than the area i came up with, and I said every animal was a square foot. But there were giraffes, lions, bears, elephants, etc. You don't think they would take up most of the space alone?

Answer 7

*Lock and Load boys, we've got an argument to shoot down*



I will disassemble this piece by piece.



The ark was 450 long, and made entirely of wood. The longest wooden ship in the world, outside of the mythical Ark, is just over 300 feet long. Do you know where that is? It sank, because constant stressing and flexing of the wooden hall from the waves poured sea-water into the hull. It had to be constantly pumped out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_%28schooner%29



It is indeed 1518750 cubic feet. That isn't 522 Boxcars though, it's only about 230 boxcars.

A Boxcar.

http://www.freefoto.com/images/25/24/25_24_17---Railroad-Boxcar_web.jpg

Typical volume of a Boxcar, about 5200 - 6600 feet cube.

http://www.csx.com/?fuseaction=customers.search_car&n=Typical%20Boxcar%20Dimensions

Volume of Creationist Boxcars? ~2669 Feet cube, according to CARM.

http://www.carm.org/questions/about-bible/could-noahs-ark-hold-all-animals



I could not find any boxcars this size. This is two to three times smaller than typical boxcars.



There are millions of species of organisms on Earth, mostly insects (about 90%).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect



There are over 5000 mammals alone, not including extinct ones. 10,000 living species of bird, 8900 of reptiles, 6200 amphibians, 30,000 fish, half of which are *freshwater* fish which cannot survive in a salt-water environment.



So, not only do you have to fit two of all these animals onboard the Ark, you have to provide both food & water. The first casualty of floods is drinking water. Even if animals are roughly the same size as sheep, you're packing 240 sheep (again, according to CARM) into a boxcar the size of your bedroom, and then you're stacking these micro boxcars ontop of each other (notice how surface area is conveniently left out of Creationist equations). No sane person would subject animals to either of these conditions. The containers on bottom would be centers of disgust and disease.



These animals alone would take up *far* more than 1\3 of the space. CARM reports about 60% of the space. They are using 1\3 size boxcars and fitting in a full-size boxcar worth of sheep into them. That alone puts their numbers at 180% of space. They don't include fish either (which they need to), or extinct animals, which there are a lot, nor water!



Considering average age of a person at that time was about 30 years of age, you're talking several generations of people to build that. Noah wasn't told to build it, but Noah's great great great great great grandfather was. He inherited a nearly finished ship.



"For those that think that this is just a story written by illiterate shepherds, I have 2 more questions."



STRAWMAN.



"The Ark is a 1:6 ratio. the same ratio used on ships today..."



And has been used on boats throughout history. The Ark wasn't the first.



"There was no America or Australia then."



Yes, there was. The current continents formed long before Noah's time. The only possible way for those animals to cross would be through the Alaskan-Russian ice-bridge, which is unpredictable and sporadic. You're talking tropical animals waiting in the dead of winter to cross that. Would. Not. Happen. They would all die by then.



Which of course, means what happened to all these creatures that require specialized habitats to begin with?



Non of this matters anyway, because the flood is a physical impossibility.

Answer 8

Were the animals stacked? Unless they stood on each others backs or levitated the number of cubic feet is irrelevent. The floor space is what counts.

Answer 9

What an absolutely ignorant and stupid claim!!! Firstly your claimed measurements are ridiculous!!



Try again!!



The number of known insects alone would require several arks even if they were piled deep on top of each other!!



The number of reptiles would need several arks even if they were piled deep on top of each other!!



The number of bird would need several arks even if they were piled deep on top of each other!!



And when we get to the animals just the known species of monkeys would require several arks even if they were piled deep on top of each other!!



Get to the land animals and you would need an armada or arks!!!



So thank you yet again that shows just what ridiculous and uneducated false claims christians will make to try and support their fantasy!!!

Answer 10

where ae you getting your information that there were only 5000 species of animals ?

this isn't given in the Bible

what is your source that what we would call Australia, North and South America did not exist?

The Bible dose not have a map of the world

So it appears you are making facts up- to fit the scenario.

Answer 11

120 years?



Meanwhile the early parts of the construction, left sitting in the weather for 120 years, has rotted and fallen apart before it was ever even put to use...



Where did we get all these other animals from?



How did one animal of each gender decide it was them that would go? Would animals in the Americas not suffer from sub freezing temperatures as they tried to make their way up and around to the Middle East? Since they couldn't swim and all...

Answer 12

5,000 animals? Really? More like 5 million, more if you count all the bugs and other crap. Unless of course you're suggesting there were only 5,000 back then, which would mean more species came into existence since then...meaning evolution must have taken place in order for there to be more animals now than there were then.

Answer 13

One reason may be they think of the ark as some kind of boat with curves ans hense somw wasted space, when "ark" means chest, It was a gigantic chest, oblong, not a boat.

Answer 14

"Since there were only about 5,000 kinds of animals..."



Is that from the Bible? Or did you just make it up?



In any case, it's ridiculous. Or you'd have to believe that the millions of species of animals on earth presently all just evolved after the flood. But, oh, jeez, you hate evolution....



The fact of the matter is that you have absolutely no evidence on your side. Because it never happened.

Answer 15

Allegory is a figurative mode of representation conveying a meaning other than the literal. Allegory teaches a lesson through symbolism. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation.



you don't get out much?

Answer 16

The fossil record disproves your claim that there were only 5000 kinds of animals at that point. Assuming you're a young earth creationist, you're only going back 5,000 years or so.

Answer 17

The idea that all the animals wouldn't fit in that boat isn't the reason we don't believe in the story...

Answer 18

well i have 4 things to say to you

i think it is possible

some people are idiots

they did not get all the animals those poor unicorns :(

and last the population increase could cause a problem dam horny rabits

Answer 19

Are you sure there were only 5000 types on animals. there are over 5000 species of mammals alone, let alone the other classes of animals

Answer 20

how would they stop from eating each other? and all the animals would have to inbreed when let out. What do you mean no Australia?

Answer 21

Life, unlike chess, continues after checkmate.

Answer 22

And why didn't the lions and tigers eat some of the other animals?

Answer 23

thank god somebody knows what their talking about

i like how all these people answering it are pulling stupid answers out of their ***, going out of their way to try and prove you wrong

"why didnt the animals eat eachother?"

really?

Answer 24

Just while reading your question ... I could feel myself ... getting ... STUPIDER.



Thanks for the laugh.

Answer 25

Because religion and politics create arguments, and Ultimatly, war.

Answer 26

Because of all thouse pictures (probably all the pictures they've seen of Noah's ark) are pictures of cute little wooden boats with animals having to stick their heads out the windows just to get space. :(

Answer 27

So how exactly did kangaroos cross the ocean?

Answer 28

I couldn't begin to legitimately attack your defenses.

Perhaps you are right, but it's not CNN.

Answer 29

Is it cold on your planet?

Answer 30

religion questions on Y! are retarded.

Answer 31

faithophobics are trying to get to you