sigh... this is going to be too easy
LOL... this might get lengthy... but here goes
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| if this were true, it would not be physically possible to put two of each animal <u>species</u> on earth, plus months' worth of food for them, in a volume of that size? |
this is the first point that you're wrong about. it wasn't 2 of every species... it was two of every type of animal. most of the different species today are derived from a common animal (ie: all the different species of dogs, cats, horses, etc.). people did a study which proved it was possible to fit 2 of every animal in the ark, and enough provisions to last for <b>2 years</b> not a month.
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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. |
ok. the <b>pentagon!</b> has a theory of how this happened. it even goes along with plate tectonics. it's believed that before this all happened, there was a large quantity of water under the crust of the earth (about half of what's in the oceans today) separated into chambers. the land was all one continent (pangea -- sp?). building pressure on this water eventually tore a crack in the crust that went around the world (this would explain the mid-oceanic ridge that circles the globe) and released all this water. the pressure caused massive erosians in the crust that covered the oceans with mud, which would explain the fossil record. the pressure also sent the water high into the atmosphere which froze the water into ice, explaining the ice age and the wooly mammoth fossils. the sudden release of pressure caused the softer rock under the divide in the crust to rise up. this 'caused the plates to shift very quickly down the ridge. when they ran into eachother they buckled which would explain why every oceanic gorge is parallel to a major mountain ridge. now... as i said... before all this happened the land was all one continent (as most scientists will agree on), and there were relatively few foothills.
on to the explaination about how the animals got there. we already established the number of animals is way below 30,000,000 because that's a species count. there's often high amounts of species for each animal category, so the actual number is much lower, and they woulda had sufficient room for all. it is also widely believed that animals have a natural sense of impending natural disasters. now. these animals new disaster was coming, so (now you gotta assume there's a God for argument's sake) God gives the animals the instinct to gather at the ark (which is what the Bible says happened... Noah didn't go out gathering animals... they came to him).
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| 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? |
umm... yeah... you once again have to assume there's a God (for argument's sake). He's God! if he can create the universe out of nothing, people out of dust, and miraculously heal terminally ill people, don't you think he can keep a few fish alive?
also, i have this documentary on Noah's ark. they have several first hand reports of people who claim to have seen it on mount ararat. they have satellite photos of what very closely resembles the ark.
if the story is impossible, than how come every major religion and culture has some form of it? don't you think they wrote down what happened? and wouldn't that imply that as cultures spread over the world afterwards, word of the event was passed down with them?
also, on the tape they talked about how some scientists at a marine labratory built a scale model of the ark, and tested it in a wave tank. the waves they put it through were equivelent of 200 foot waves (like what would be found if such an event as the global flood did occur), and not only did it do well... it was virtually unsinkable. it could survive being tipped up to a 90 degree angle and still right itself.
so you see... Noah's ark did happen. it also explains a lot of what science fails to. many scientists will now agree that it was very well possible.
EDIT: the people who gave first hand accounts have never met eachother before... but they all gave the same description. there's also several written accounts of people seeing the ark centuries ago. and the descriptions also just so happen to match up with the descriptions given in the Bible.
round one goes to Cottons