back in a thread regarding palestine, cottons made the ubelievable statement that everything (yes ladies and gentlemen, everything) in it (bible) is true. absolutely no part of it was wrong. in order not to swamp that thread with totally off-topic discussions, i said there that i'd start this. a few days went by where i was not on the city due to work and partying i got back, and somone was gloating over that i had not started this thread yet
i'm not one to back out of a challenge. so here goes :
-- why the bible is wrong --
------------ part I ----------
i'll do something big and easy first. noah's ark...
Q: Genesis 6:15 states that noah's ark was 300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits in size. we know that a cubit was approximately 18 inches, yielding a volume (if perfectly rectangular, the most voluminous possible shape of three unequal dimensions) of 1,518,750 cubic feet. into this, you must fit two of each of the 30,000,000 species on earth, plus the food to keep all of them alive for a month.
if this were true, it would not be physically possible to put two of each animal species on earth, plus months' worth of food for them, in a volume of that size?
A: its highly questionable if the animals were simply piled in that volume, with no room for bedding or even room to stand, whether there would be adequate room, even without the food.
the author of the flood myth simply didn't understand the extent of faunal diversity in the world. as for the volumetric problem, you can simply calculate that it wouldn't fit by adding the volume of the average sized animal's body, multiplied by the number of species. excluding bacteria, but including all insects, there are more than 30,000,000 species of land animals on earth. multiply that volume by two, and add in the volume of food required to keep both of each species alive for as much as twenty years, and its pretty obvious that this isn't going to work. then there's the time it would take to gather up the 30 million species.
if you gathered a male and a female of one species every ten seconds, it would take about ten years to gather up 30 million of them. And mind you, you've got to go to Antarctica to get penguins, the Arctic to get polar bears, Asia to get tigers, Australia to get kangaroos, Africa to get gorillas, South America to get tapirs and agoutis, etc., and you have got to get them back with an adequate supply of their required food and put them in the ark within ten seconds. then when the flood's over, you've got to take another ten years to put them all back at the rate of a species every ten seconds.
then there are all kinds of ecological questions; how are many delicate marine species going to survive when the salinity of the oceans is reduced by two thirds, as it would have been if a worldwide flood of nearly five miles in depth had occurred? How are species going to survive that require mature ecosystems which themselves require centuries to mature?
obviously, this story isn't just impossible, it’s ludicrous.