📜 Noah’s Ark (Part 1) 📜

Young Earth Creationists (YECs), come in many flavors.

Some insist the earth is only 6,000 years old. Others allow it could be as much as 10,000.

Some believe there was a world wide flood. Some accept that maybe it was a massive regional flood.

Some think dinosaurs never existed. Alternatively, some believe Noah had dinosaurs on the Ark.

I’ll cover some of the various YEC convictions in future posts. This post is to specifically address the belief that there was a world wide flood, and Noah had dinosaurs and other now-extinct critters on the Ark. Having been raised in a YEC environment, I’m in the position of witnessing how the narrative has changed through the years.

As a child, I don’t remember ever hearing any denials that dinosaurs existed. I also never heard anyone say that Noah had dinosaurs on the Ark. It’s like there was a disconnect in YEC thinking. After all, the traditional paintings of Noah’s Ark never showed dinosaurs. They showed farm animals and jungle animals walking up the ramp, so that must be how it was. Dinosaurs were never even considered or mentioned in Sunday School.

I know for certain that by the 1960s, YECs believed humans and dinosaurs lived side by side, largely due to the Glen Rose dinosaur tracks controversy.

Possibly as early as the 1980s, but certainly by the 1990s, some evangelists began concurring that Noah took dinosaurs onto the Ark. They acknowledged that many dinosaurs were very large, so they concluded that Noah must have taken them on as babies so they would fit in the limited space.

In recent decades, with the explosion of new paleontological digs and progressively sophisticated new technologies used in evolutionary fields, more and more new fossilized extinct species have been found and described. To date, about 250,000 extinct species have been identified: mostly marine species but also reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, proto-mammals, mammals and many more. Yet more new ones are constantly being discovered. This is in addition to the +1.5 million living animal species. It has become impossible to declare that Noah carried a pair of every land animal on the Ark. Even the largest modern ship wouldn’t be capable of such a task.

A new rationale had to be proposed to force the science to fit the Biblical account. The concept of “kinds” was contrived, a twisted nod to the proper evolutionary definition of clades.

The way “kinds” is reputed to work is this: A pair of each kind of animal was taken on the Ark, and after disembarking, following the flood, each given pair would produce all it’s related species. For example, a pair of the canid kind went on to produce the dogs, wolves, foxes, jackals and all the other canid species which have ever existed. A pair of the equine kind went on to produce the horses, donkeys, zebras and all the other equine species which have ever existed. And so on and so on and so on with all the “kinds” of animals. Those espousing this belief repeatedly use the word kinds when naming the various animals.

According to the Ark Encounter, “studies estimate the total number of living and extinct kinds of land animals and flying creatures to be 1,398”, which means that “Noah cared for 6,744 animals”.

What studies? Who calculated those numbers? Where are the citations? This is typical pseudo-science: making claims that can’t be backed up.

There are numerous problems with this postulation.

• It’s claiming a form of evolution while denying evolution.
• It would have been impossible to carry enough food for all those animals. The amount of hay needed just for the grazing animals alone would have taken an entire fleet of Arks. If you think otherwise, you never put up hay for the winter for farm livestock.
• Continuing with food, it would have been impossible for Noah to accommodate highly specialized diets, like live Eucalyptus leaves for Koalas, live bamboo for Pandas, nectar for Sunbirds, and so forth, on and on.
• It would have been impossible for Noah to supply the proper climates for animals extremely sensitive to temperature, humidity, etc. Many animals can only survive in freezing conditions (Arctic, Antarctic, high altitudes in mountainous regions), or dry hot deserts. Many animals are so specialized to their climate, that a tiny change will kill them.
• It makes absolutely no sense that God would have enabled hundreds of thousands of species to quickly come into being, only for most of them to go extinct right away.
• It’s not Biblical. Period. Show me something in the Bible that irrefutably supports such a ridiculous scenario.

I could make many more points to explain why this theory is impossible, but I’m not trying to write a book.

I won’t copy Leviticus 11 in it’s entirety. Get your Bible out and look for yourself. But that chapter names many “kinds” of animals. Some include: owl, little owl, great owl -and- vulture, gier eagle (gier eagle is a vulture). And several other closely related species are named specifically, which directly contrasts the perceived definition of kind in this version of the Noah’s Ark story.

In the future, I will write more posts refuting alternative Noah hypotheses, and explaining why a world wide flood was impossible. Not everyone will agree with me, but that’s ok.