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If it took 40 days and 40 nights to flood every landmass in the world...?
... did people not have time to consider lashing a couple of tables together or anything?
Did wood technology not exist in the days of Genesis? Was Noah the only person capable of building a boat? In the New Testament, it seems like every third person is a fisherman; did nobody have boats already?
CAustin: This is very true, but a God capable of that would surely just cut to the chase and cause every bad person in the world to keel over dead. It'd be a lot less soggy afterwards, and a lot of innocent animals wouldn't be drowned.
Justin: I'm thinking of this as more of a gaping plot hole than any sort of logic ;)
Vandal: Well, if you're going to go into the technical details, we know the exact measurements of the boat God told Noah to build. Does it sound big enough to hold 40 days worth of food and rations for half a dozen people and two of every single species on the planet? It doesn't sound big enough to contain the 350,000 species beetles alone. Not with the occasional nasty crunching noise underfoot, anyhow.
Sage: Well, technically, there's more than enough water in the solar system, for given values of 'solar system'. The Oort cloud has several billion chunks of ice floating in it. Presumably God hauled off and got a couple of these and melted them. And then, er, used some sort of cosmic sponge afterwards to mop it up.
20 Answers
- Anonymous1 decade agoFavorite Answer
It's difficult to disprove the "a magic guy did it" hypothesis; after all, he could have used his magic to sink all the boats carrying people he wanted to drown.
Whether you're arguing that Yahweh killed everyone in a flood, or that invisible leprechauns are the reason your computer works, the "a magic guy did it" explanation has a failproof counter for any logical challenge: "it was resolved by magic."
Source(s): True, but such a God could have averted all of the Biblical problems by making humans in a competent way so that they don't keep doing things he has to punish and discourage in the first place - a truly competent programmer doesn't create algorithms to identify and punish errors; he writes programs that don't encounter the errors in the first place. You can blame humans all you want for sin, but fundamentally, any human error is a design error on God's part. Presumably, the Biblical god is either mildly incompetent and extremely irritable, or he simply prefers the world to have a bit of suffering for his own dramatic amusement. - 5 years ago
The rain lasted 40 days and 40 nights. The water flooded the earth for 150 days. It took more than a year from the time Noah entered the ark, before they were able to leave.
- Anonymous1 decade ago
There is not enough water in the known solar system!!
But better yet how do you get rid of such an amount of water in 40 days and nights? It would have had to do more than just furiously boil - it would have had to explode into huge steam jets that could get clean out of the atmosphere!! Any living thing would have been boiled alive long before the process ever got started!!!
- ThisIsIt!Lv 71 decade ago
Apparently Noah could also construct canoes. He put a few Aborigines and the kangaroos on them and they paddled their way to Australia.
I mean, how else would kangaroos get there? The Tasmanian Devils was banished to Tasmania because they never got the respect they deserved from Noah.
Noah just stood on the deck, looking skyward.
With lots of lightening going on. Ka-boom
- strpentaLv 71 decade ago
Then there was a year of floating...I always was at a loss to unsderstand what eveyone ate and how only eight people could clean up after all those animals. Now that I think of it-it must have smelled pretty bad, too.
- Anonymous1 decade ago
try to survive for 40 days and 40 nights with no food and only salt water. Plus, no ship was as large as Noah's Ark. That's like driving a speed boat in a category 5 hurricane for 40 days & nights.
- The DickensLv 51 decade ago
We understand the entire world was not flooded. The flood the writer portrays is a flood he'd heard about that seemed to be worldwide to the simple, untraveled people of that time.
The story of Noah and the Arc is significant for the greater truths it conveys. It is a tale rich with symbolism. The waters represent baptism. The arc itself represents the Church. The rainbow is God's promise to us that the entire world will never be destroyed by natural disaster.
It is meant to give hope to those seeking refuge from both physical and spiritual disasters. The only people who take the tale so hyper-literally are fundamentalists and atheists. Both groups stubbornly refuse to understand God's poetic means of conveying truth.
- Super AtheistLv 71 decade ago
Wood, eh? Interesting concept. You say it floats?
Presumably no-one knew that. And they were all too busy drowning to notice a few floating things milling around.
Imagine taking over a month to drown, and not thinking of hanging on to floaty stuff. Good thing they're all dead. I call it evolution in action.
- Anonymous1 decade ago
People who take stories like that seriously make me feel a bit ashamed of being the same species as them.
