In terms of Old Testament tales, the Biblical flood story makes for a great science fiction read, even makes a grand (but fictional) epic film splendid but that's about as far as it goes. The accent here must be on the word 'fiction'. In fact, this has just got be the most crock of bovine fertilizer I've ever read about. How any thinking man can swallow this fairy tale is beyond me. Just consider.
Where did all the water come from? There's unmistakably not sufficient water vapour in the climate to precipitate out for 40 days and nights! And would 40 days and nights of rain even be sufficient to cover the top mountain peak? I doubt it. And where did all the water go after-the-fact?
Then there's that minor detail of unmistakably building the Ark. Given the size it would have to be (room for all those multi-tens-of-thousands of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and millions more invertebrates), just using a very few labourers without modern power tools, it would have to take decades, if not centuries to unblemished the task. And that's after you have gathered all of the raw materials and transported them on site. From an engineering point of view, there is a limit to how big you can make a viable, sailable wooden boat using only materials and technology ready at the time. Too large, as the Ark would have to be, it would at best leak and gently sink; at worst break apart and rapidly sink, pilotage on a rough and stormy global sea. With no land masses to get in the way, can you imagine the force the winds could get to? Cape Horn would be a level pond comparatively speaking.
After taking mega-years to build the damn ship, your work isn't finished. Somehow you have got to find, collect, get together all the supplies needed as well as find, get and get all the animals required for the voyage. That would take quite some valuable time - as in more mega-years. How long would it take you to round up two of every animal species on Planet Earth along with all the resources required to keep them in the style of life to which they have come to be accustomed for forty days and nights? Don't forget that many animals have very exact dietary, etc. Requirements. I think most pet owners find it quite daunting sufficient to deal with the time and vigor to look after just a few animals, far less some hundred thousand!
And just how did all those thousands of species of animals not native to the region happen to make it to the Ark if they weren't collected by Noah and friends? I mean like polar bears and penguins and animals native to the Americas? I assume koalas and kangaroos went along for the ride. How did they get to the Holy Lands? How did these animals get returned to their native lands after-the-fact?
There are the logistical and manpower issues that need to be looked at after the building and conference together aspects. There's the need to load and store all those supplies for the sufficient care and feeding of at minimum a hundred thousand animal species (times two - one of each sex), and that's excluding all the insects and other invertebrates (so add some million more). What sort of manpower is needed to care for, feed, exercise, clean (especially clean) and arrange of the organic refuse of all those animals? Let's just say that a typical zoo has way fewer animals and lots more staff. Noah and crew would never have gotten any sleep. Since there are only 86,400 seconds in a day, each animal would have rated less than a few seconds a day even multiplying allowable seconds in a day by all the ready manpower for said care and feeding and practice and cleaning. Maybe Noah and crew were born on and came from Krypton!
Was Noah and crew (family) great in the care of wildlife? Were they certified veterinarians who could look after a sick animal? After all, if one of the two-by-two of a kind died, then it's curtains for that species. It goes extinct! I'd guess they probably weren't so qualified, which was a major oversight Imho.
Relatively few life forms would have survived in a global ocean. That includes most fish as all that added fresh water would have diluted the oceans enough, and the rising sea water levels contaminate fresh water lakes, etc. Such that nearly all marine and fresh water fish would have died. Therefore, I guess the Ark had to have been a floating aquarium in increasing to all things else.
And just how did all those dry land plants survive after being submerged for weeks on end? Well, I guess the Ark had to carry a lot of plants too! Of policy fresh water for all the plants wouldn't have been much of a problem, but what of sunlight since all things had to be stored below decks? Of policy Maybe all plants were stored as seeds, but how do seeds (or the actual plants for that matter) native to Australia, New Zealand, or Hawaii say get to the Middle East?
And how could the Ark avow all those allowable environmental conditions on board to sustain the lives of such a diversity of wildlife? From polar to tropical, desert to rainforest, how? And how could the Ark carry hundreds of thousands of animal species (including nearly all the birds), millions if you include insects (which you'd have to do), along with standard food for all, all for a minimum of 40 days and nights (plus added time for the waters to entirely recede)? Do you perceive how entirely inadequate the Biblical accounting of the Ark is for such a mission? It's like trying to house and feed a human people of thousands in a bed-sitter flat!
Speaking of allowable environmental conditions, you have got to pity the poor human occupants on board - the crew. I mean in the middle of the weighty animal stink and animal noise and the constant wet and constant seasickness from the rolling global ocean, plus very poor ventilation and what with no galvanic lights, inhaling the smoke and fumes from whatever oil-based light source(s) they had - well there sure was no occupational condition and security back then!
There's also a few other quirks. unmistakably in some cases you need more than two per species. You can't have just two dogs or two cats, but two of every dog breed and two of every cat breed. Multiply that by all other species that have assorted distinctive breeds. Speaking of breeds, where did all our genetic racial diversity come from if there were only a few (Noah and crew) survivors of this Biblical (global) flood?
In fact, since some animals only eat live (animal) food, I guess more than two of some species had to be on board to serve as standard snacks. I mean there wasn't any tinned or dry cat food ready for the moggies, no means of refrigeration of raw meat or fish, so extra live mice had best be on hand. That sort of example could be multiplied many times over.
After-the-fact, when the flood waters receded, what food would the herbivores eat? It would take some time for the grasses and bushes and trees and forests to regenerate. Further, immediately after-the-fact, wouldn't the predator-prey ratio be all screwed up? I mean in a salutary population, prey vastly outnumber predators. If there are 200 deer and 2 lions, both survive. If there are two deer and two lions, both go kaput pretty quickly, the deer killed for food, the lions then starve.
And isn't it strange that there were no other boats in existence that would have carried other survivors? I mean apparently every other boat in Biblical time's existence sank, apart from the Ark! Rather inadequate boat building skills back then apparently or Maybe the whole story has all the reality of a Twilight Zone episode.
Now God may have a bone to pick with humans, but not with innocent animals. Although God dos the right thing by 'saving' a pair of each species, God also exhibited extreme cruelty in murdering (drowning) untold multi-millions of innocent animals.
There's that understanding of murder which God perpetrated on the human race en masse despite his or her own commandment about not killing. Thou shall not kill is one of the Ten Commandments I believe. So you'd think that God would custom what he (or she) preaches, but doesn't, agreeing to the Old Testament. Because the Biblical flood was God's flood, God was the most mass murderer in the history of the world, a murderer that puts tyrants the likes of Hitler to a status of rank amateur! I mean there are not only the Biblical flood story, but what about Sodom and Gomorrah? You can't trust a god who basically says 'do as I say, not as I do'.
The logic of it all is illogical in the extreme. And even if the Biblical flood were only a localized affair (which makes far more sense and explains some of the above problems), that still doesn't absolve God from being a mass murderer.
If God - assuming a God exists and being all great and such - unmistakably wanted to wipe out all but a very few of his or her originally chosen people, those made in God's image, humanity in other words (but please spare the innocent animals), he or she unmistakably picked a complicated way of doing it. A unmistakably all great God could have just snapped his or her fingers and instantaneously all of the humanity bar those very few extra ones (Noah and company) would have come to be the dead dust of history. But why be quick and merciful when you can drag it out and make them suffer!
Now the tale of the global flood is in fact global! Cultures from around the world tell similar tales to the Biblical flood. The argument is that therefore the story must be true as these diverse cultures had no perceive with each other. My write back to that is related to bovine fertilizer! End of the world tales, or myths, the understanding of Armageddon, punishing the wicked with total catastrophe was as coarse and popular then as now. We all love a good 'end of the world' story that has a moral attached. Alas, the choices or mechanisms ready for said end of the world stories to myth makers' way back then were rather limited. They had no knowledge of supernovae or gamma-ray bursts or weighty solar flares or nuclear war and resulting holocausts or killer asteroids smacking into Planet Earth, etc. All they had to work with was the day-to-day sorts of routine natural events part and parcel of their daily lives. In fact, many tale-spinners might not have been familiar with, say, volcanoes, and while most relatively violent weather phenomena, like tornadoes, may be destructive, they aren't destructive sufficient to wipe out the wicked that populate a wide area. However, everybody would have experienced rain, heavy rain, even torrential rain say from hurricanes, etc. That resulted in minor flooding, or say witnessed storm surges from the sea that inundated the land, and/or witnessed rivers, ponds and lakes overflowing. It doesn't take that much imagination to notch up minor real events, in the guise of story telling, to mega disaster proportions. If it rains heavily for one day and there's some local flooding, up the ante to 40 days. It's difficult to imagine any story teller from 5000 years ago advent up with any other sort of end of the world scenario!
The one point to end-of-the-world, mega disaster stories is that there must be at least one survivor to tell the tale! I get in this case that includes survivors such as Noah and kin.
I have read of one other explanation for universal flood stories. If I recall correctly, a trainee of Freud came up with the idea that the tellers/inventors of flood tales got the idea from dreams in their sleep. And they dreamed the dream all because they were asleep with relatively full bladders. Personally, I think that's a piss-weak explanation!
Is there an additional one solution? Well, here's one possibility. What if God, she, he or whatever, were in reality a very 'flesh and blood' extraterrestrial (E.T.) computer programmer, who has written a software box called, say "Planet Earth". Maybe it's a computer or interactive video game - maybe a homework assignment for a smart E.T. Student. Anyway, computer software unmistakably explains all the Biblical miracles (virgin births; the resurrection, etc.) or anomalies (like where did the whole Biblical flood's rain come from; where did all the water go; how did Jonah survive inside a large fish, etc.) or inconsistencies (like Cain's wife, the discrepancies in the middle of Biblical time and geological time). About the Biblical flood, no humans unmistakably died; no animals suffered and drowned, and so on, because the humans and animals were never real to start with, just as you and I aren't real, just part of - for want of a best analogy - a computer game simulation. Now that's pretty outlandish, but probably no more so that unmistakably spending time, effort, vigor and your hard earned dollars in hunt of the mythological and Imho nonexistent Noah's Ark.
But if you still believe in the corporeal reality of Noah's Ark., then I guess it is logical to believe that the Ark must of carried unicorns, fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden, dragons, centaurs, leprechauns, elves, sirens, Bigfoot, griffins, werewolves, trolls and just for good measure, the Cyclopes (plus a host of others).
The more confident conclusion or implication is, if the Bible - the alleged word of God - gets this alleged event so wrong - it fails on any level of logic you care to apply - then how much faith can you put in the rest of the Biblical text? What sort of credibility does the Bible have? My reliance is that it has unmistakably none. So, potentially then the whole Bible, judging by the tale of the global flood, is a farce - just a collection of myths and fairy tales for grownups.
Noah's Ark and the Biblical Flood: Reality Or Nonsense?