The Flood
Genesis 6 5 The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. 6 The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. 7 So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth, men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air, for I am grieved that I have made them."
Just in a short time, the world was over run by wickedness, even though it would have been impossible to populate even one continent. However, what catches my attention more is the fact that God “grieved” that He had made man on earth. Now, as an omnipotent, omniscient God He should have seen this coming before he even created everything! Just because man is wicked, not only is he going to be wiped out but all the animals on earth to! Come on! Sins when, is some water going to clean the earth form sin? What did the animals and plants have to do with it? Did God not know that sin is now part and parcel of man? That it is a spiritual thing and not a physical thing. Don’t you think this is actually the right time to send in Jesus to die for man’s sins?
Genesis 6 8 But Noah found favour in the eyes of the LORD. 9 This is the account of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God. 10 Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.11 Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, "I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. 14 So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.
The bible describes the earth as full of violence and that all the people were corrupt in their ways. As discussed earlier on it was God, who contributed to this situation. It would have been imposable for Adam & Eve to populate the earth so He had to create a lot more people to do so. These people were full of sin and not only that, God had cursed the earth too. Now He is angry because people do not like Him. Nevertheless, “luckily” for us God fancied Noah and decided to save him and his family. Now, Noah had to build a huge boat.
Genesis 6 15 This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. 16 Make a roof for it and finish the ark to within 18 inches of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. 17 I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish.
The Ark’s specifications:
| Length |
450 feet |
137.16 meters |
| Width |
75 feet |
22.86 meters |
| Height |
45 feet |
13.72 meters |
| Window |
18 inches |
45.72 centimetres |
According to the bible there was never rain before the flood (+/- 4,700 years ago), although there is geological and archaeological evidence of rain falling on earth for the last few hundred thousand million years! However, we do not want to spoil a good story with facts, now do we? The largest wooden ship ever built was just over 300 feet (91.44m), and they required diagonal iron strapping for support. Even so, they leaked so badly that they had to be pumped constantly. Using modern equipment, it can take good shipyard years to build a large ship, using hundreds of men. Noah (five hundred years old at the time) apparently had himself, a few helpers and a lot of wood. We are expected to believe that he built the Ark, using crude hand-tools, in a world filled with evil and scheming criminals. ("The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.")
Here are a few of the things he would have had to deal with:
» “Wood rotting”. Left out in the open, the partly built Ark would be exposed to the elements, such as rain (or mist according to the bible), wind, fungus, termites and ravenous beavers (well, maybe not beavers). Maybe he first built a huge hangar in which he could construct it safely. That would have almost as great an enterprise as the Ark itself! Unfortunately, the Bible does not enlighten us as to the whereabouts of Noah's Shed. I guess it was washed away in the Flood...
» “Theft and vandalism”. The hordes of fiendish deviants living around Noah at the time would no doubt have had enjoyed enormous sinful fun by sabotaging the Ark, stealing the wood for themselves (why cut and prepare your own wood when Noah has done the job for you?) and harassing the few workers.
» “Sag”. Modern shipyards build large ships from metal, as wooden ships beyond a certain size simply cannot support their own weight out of water. Either Noah had access to some amazing technology unknown to us, or the size of the Ark is somewhat exaggerated.
» Are we to believe that Noah, with no “shipbuilding knowledge” and no shipbuilding tradition to rely upon, was able to construct a wooden ship that was longer than any that has been built since? Moreover, he had only his three sons and their wives to help! This ship there is only one window (Gen 8:6) in this ship. How did all the animals and people breathe?
It is also not the first time that the bible mentions that man and animals both have the “breath of life” in them.
Genesis 6 19 You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. 21 You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them."
Ok, this is the most phenomenal event that ever occurred on this planet. Just a little while ago God swore that He is going to kill every living thing on this miserable planet, but now He is trying to save some animals. Even if you try to believe the fact that God made all the animals go and find Noah, how did they get to him? Large animals probably ran there and it took them a few months to do so. But how do you think they got over all the rivers and oceans? How did the big five from Southern Africa travel all the way up to the Middle East? How did the kangaroo and Kuala bear from Australia catch a ride on a whale to cross the oceans? Were the bears, beavers and buffalo of America carried over the ocean by thousands of birds? How did all the animals that lived on islands or the animals at the North and South Pole get to the Middle East? How did all the specialised foodstuff get to Noah? Animals cannot eat any type of plants. Many animals have extremely specialised diets. Koalas, for instance, eat one kilogram of fresh Eucalyptus tree leaves per day, which provide all their water and nutrition. Moreover, what about the animals that were hibernating; it is always winter somewhere on the planet. The 320 different species of humming-bird, for example, have very high metabolic rates and have to consume large amounts of nectar throughout the day. The Ark would have had to cater for 640 humming-birds, requiring an almost constant supply of fresh nectar, from flowers. Flowers would not grow in great abundance in a dark, damp boat. How could the ark cope with disposing of the waste products of those creatures? It must have had an incredibly advanced plumbing and ventilation system, superior to anything found on modern ocean liners or large military vessels. One problem that dairy farmers have is that vast quantities of fresh dung produce highly toxic gases (falling into the slurry pit can be fatal because of this), and it would have been many times worse on an Ark. Next time you are at a zoo, ask one of the keepers how easy it is to deal with the needs of the few hundred animals they have for a month, and then imagine scaling that up to a gigantic floating zoo with millions of creatures being looked after by one old man and his family.
It is preposterous and completely imposable for this type of event to happen. How do you think all the smaller animals go there, snails, worms, moles, wood lice, etc, etc!! Ah, maybe the angels carried them to Noah. If that is the case then why did they have to be carried all the way to be crammed in the Ark? Why can’t the angels just put them in a “save place” in heaven, till the rain is over and then place them back on earth! Have you any idée of the vast number of animals there is on planet earth. NO, they did not evolve from after the flood. There are over 350,000 different types of beetles alone! Do you know how much space 700,000 beetles will take, and they are only one of the millions of insect types there are. What about the hundreds and thousands of parasitic species? Especially those that only live for a few weeks! Then we have not even begun to count the mammals and invertebrates. What happened to the carnivores (lions, tigers, eagles, crocodiles etc, etc), they had to eat too? This story is a fable and it is a shame for Christians to teach such lies as truth form the pulpits and too their children!
2 or 7 of every kind?
But the story gets even better. Gen 6:20 God tells Noah to take two of every kind of animal into the ark. Then in Gen 7:
Genesis 7 1 The LORD then said to Noah, "Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. 2 Take with you seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, 3 and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth. 4 Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made."
First God tells Noah (Gen 6:19-20) that he must take 2 of every kind of animal into the ark. Now God tells him he must take 7 of every kind of clean animal, 2 of every kind of unclean animal and 7 of every kind of bird. But the best is still to come. Apparently, God was not very good at maths. “Take with you seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate” – with 7 animals you can not take a male and its mate. 2, multiply by any number will always give you an even number. How did God arrive at 7? You can argue that it was translated wrongly to mean Noah had to take “7 pairs” of each specific species into the ark with him. However, that will increase the number of animals that had to go onto the boat by a huge amount! You would need hundreds, thousands of arks more.
What is the use of the Ark? There must have been millions of angels flying there asses of to try to get all the right animals to Noah in time. It must have been an incredible sight and achievement. It must have been a godly intervention, there is NO WAY Noah could have gone all over the world to collect these animals and no way for them to get to him! Why would God want to cram all these animals with a few humans into a boat that cannot float and is not big enough to fit everything? Why not just put everyone and every thing in heaven, flood the world and put every thing back. Maybe God created a few extra dimensions in the Ark to fit everyone in. Makes you think hey!
More crazy talk
According to God, the reason He decided to save Noah was that he was righteous. He was such a righteous man, he drank so much that he got naked and passed out in front of his family (Gen 9:19-20).
Genesis 7 17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. 18 The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. 19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. 20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet. 21 Every living thing that moved on the earth perished-birds, livestock, wild animals, and all the creatures that swarms over the earth, and all mankind. 22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. 23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left and those with him in the ark. 24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.
God is a baby killer! Throughout the Old Testament God caused the death of hundreds and thousands of innocent babies, children and people. Here is the first time that He killed indiscriminately. Imagine how many innocent babies, children and people were killed in this flood. What for? For a God who throws a tantrum when his experiment does not go according to plan? Don’t you think it would have been better of God sending Jesus to die for their sins, than to kill thousands of innocent babies and children? Imagine the horror of parents trying to keep their children alive with all the water that just keep on rising! While one after the other sinks below the waves. This is the God you call “Father”!
Where did all this water come form? The bible states that all mountains were covered, until they were about twenty feet below water. Some people might find it a little odd that God, omnipotent being who can create entire galaxies in an instant, takes weeks and weeks to flood the planet. Perhaps water is a bit fiddly to create.
25“And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.”
Over the top of Mt. Everest? The volume of water would have been astronomical. Millions of cubic kilometres. Where did it come from? Where did it go? The polar ice caps are not big enough. The atmosphere does not contain millions of cubic kilometres of water. Using a bit of armchair maths, we can roughly calculate how much water would have been needed to cover the planet to the top of Mt. Everest:
The radius of the Earth is approx: 6370 km
The height of Everest above sea-level is approx: 8.8 km
Therefore, the volume of the Earth is approx: 1,082,696,932,000 km³
Or 1,082 trillion cubic kilometres.
The volume of the earth to the height of Everest is: 1,087,190,293,000 km³
Subtracting: first volume - second gives approx: 4,493,361,000
Or 4,500 million cubic kilometres of water!
In addition, this rain is supposed to have fallen within about 40 days. That means that there would have been about 220m of rainfall every day over the entire planet (8800/40 = 220)! A few centimetres in a day are considered extremely heavy rain.
Assuming it was fresh water (as it rained) this would have severely diluted the oceans, causing devastation among the marine creatures. Ask anyone with a marine fish-tank just how sensitive reef-fish and corals are to changes in water conditions. Virtually all sea-life that could not stand brackish water would have been destroyed.
One imaginative way of explaining away the water is that the Earth was a lot flatter back then - the mountains were very low and the seas very shallow. After the Flood, God raised the mountains and sank the ocean floors, reducing the land area and creating space for the water to drain away too. As usual, there is no evidence to support this notion, and it just raises more questions.
For example, how did the deep-ocean sea creatures come about? There are plenty of fish than can only survive at the great pressures on the ocean bottoms, the abyssal plains. These could not have existed before the Flood, as the oceans were apparently too shallow. Maybe they evolved after the Flood. In an incredibly short time, no way! Maybe Satan created them (after all, they are all really ugly with lots of teeth)? Funny how creationists use evolution (and other branches of science) when it suits them, but denounces it as Satanic lies the rest of the time...
What the bible also fails to mention is all the plant live that would have been wiped out from such a flood. Most plants submerged under water would die after a few days. There would have been no plant life alive after this flood. What did the animals live from when they left the ark? There would not have been any food for them for a very long time! What happened to the carnivores? They had to eat too. Al they could have eaten was the other animals that came out of the ark with them! Don’t tell me, God sustained all the plant eaters for the next year or two and He sustained the meat eaters for the next ten to fifty years, until there were enough animals for them to hunt? Please, stop this lie!
Genesis 8 3 The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, 4 and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible. 6 After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark 7 and sent out a raven and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. 8 Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. 9 But the dove could find no place to set its feet because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. 10 He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. 11 When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. 12 He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him. 13 By the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry. 15 Then God said to Noah, 16 "Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives.
Verse 6-7 - Noah sends out a raven (crow), but it keeps on flying back and forth until the water has “dried up from the earth”.
Verse 8-9 - He sends out a dove to see if the water had receded form the “surface of the ground”. However, there was still water all over the earth.
Verse 10 - Seven days later, he sends out the dove again and behold, it returned with an olive branch! Not only have the water receded at a scientifically imposable rate, but an olive tree had survived underwater all this time! On the other hand, it could have grown in just seven days! It is your story so you can pick which one you think can be told on “Ripley’s Believe it or not”.
Verse 12 - The dove was sent out, but did not return. I do not know if it was sterile, and not necessary to partake in the breeding process to repopulate the earth. Any one that knows any thing about doves/pigeons knows that they always return to their home, no matter how far away they are form it. It is not in the dove’s nature to leave the ark and not return!
Verse 13 - The earth was dry on the first day of the first month (of Noah’s 601st year).
Verse 14 - The earth was dry on the 27th day of the second month. Which is it?
Genesis 8 20 Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. 21 The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.
God loves his sacrifices and pagan rituals! But according to (Gen 7:8) the offering to God would have caused the extinction of a few species!
First God killed all living things (Gen 6:5), because humans are evil. Then God promises not to do it again (Gen 8:21), because humans are evil. Did he not know before the flood that humans are going to stay “evil” even though He killed 99.99% of all living things?
Once Noah had seen all the animals off, he then had to set about repopulating the world. Again, incest in the bible rears its ugly head. Noah's family had to inbreed to have children. Sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, first cousins and first cousins (as Noah's sons had their wives with them) all nicely mixed.
Just as an aside, as all people before Noah were now dead, how does anyone know if the other events in the OT are true? We only have Noah's word for it! The human race effectively began again with Noah & co. There is also NO mentioning of any historical documentation taken onto the ark. Noah and his family could not have memorised every detail of earth’s history up unto them to teach their bastard children.
Makes you wonder why the omniscient God even bothered with Adam & Eve. Why not start straight away with Noah? He would have known what was coming or did he?
