Summations Only

The idea, of course, is to be open minded without being SO open minded your brain falls out...Fact is (and anecdotal hand-waving aside, the real engineers have the facts) wooden and especially reed boats that large are impossible to keep afloat unless you say "godidit" which totally negates the whole need to even HAVE a boat We're skeptical about a wooden boat with known dimensions exceeding the known, tested tolerances of wooden boats built thousands of years later with technology thousands of years more advanced and techniques not only unknown but undrempt of by illiterate goat-herders from the stone age.We're also mighty skeptical about it managing to hold 7 of ALL clean types of animal and 2 of every other type of animal from the face of the entire planet, without ventilation and pumps, without running out of food and with a crew of a dozen or less. for a year.WTF is this boat, a tardis? If you want to say Noah built a tardis out of reeds, quite frankly, it's less unbelievable.As for the rest of your post, if I didn't know better, I'd say you were one of us.Scientists make what was before impossible, possible. And they do it daily.Stone-age goat herders do not.

As has been said, giving a link to a creationists website, who let's be frank are not non-biased and certainly haven't won any awards for shipbuilding, isn't the most reliable witness.I'll play the "bible code" card and say that just because they've used computers, doesn't mean it can't be bullsh*t.I think the defining answer was several pages back when it was made clear that* the boat would shear itself to pieces, even IF it floated safely
* the boat would not float upright, it would roll, yaw and pitch and spin and then sink within a few minutes of a torrential flood
* the boat would spring so many leaks it wouldn't last 40 days, let alone a year, no matter how calm the waters
* the boat was non-ventilated, so the animals and people would die
* it would be physically impossible to fit all the animals of all the world into a space that small
* it would be physically impossible to fit all the food for all the animals of the world for a year into a space that small, even IF there weren't that many animals
* it would be physically impossible to keep enough food fresh enough for all the animals of all the world to eat, without magical non-electric fridges and ice that kept cool but didn't melt
* it would be physically impossible for a crew of 8? 12? to muck out AND run the ship containing all the animals of all the world, for 40 days and nights (let alone a year)
* it would be physically impossible, even given magic scaling-up and magic trees, for one man to make a boat (that was the wrong shape to even float safely) that large with stone-age tools, even IF it took him 40 years
* it would be physically impossible for that amount of water to even appear and then disappear from the surface of the earth
* it would be physically impossible for such a small tribe of people to populate the entire earth in what amounts to three generations, even IF you handwave the inability of these people to cross the great oceans and seasso, given that every. single. one. of those is an impossibility, isn't it just a tad unlikely that it ever actually happened?

Oh, I have no problem in it being an allegorical, summarized, partially fictitious account of a real event. those sorts of narratives are being written now and have been for hundreds if not thousands of years!the problem is scale - when it's supposed to be big enough to carry multiples of every type of animal on the face of the planet, when it's supposed to be built with technology thousands of years out of date, when it can't be duplicated now with all of our advanced technology, then I have issues.*Reed boats are made to twist
- the point is that whether it was reed or not, it would break at that size (we can't do it *now*, and I'm sorry, we're smarter and more capable than a single shepherd thousands of years ago)*Not sure about this point - yawing, rolling, etc.
- the point was that whatever it was made of, the shape described would not be stable and would kill everybody on board and sink.*There are no such things as leeks on a reed boat. Water drains through.
- the point is, if you put a reed boat (even a large one) to sea for a year...it would sink. You can't drain it when you're on the water. if it was wood as it says, they had no pumps at the time...*Ventilation depends on the interpretation - not sure
- I'll give you this one, but I think it highly likely it would cause at least great sickness*It is possible to put 2-7 animals of each type in Sumer on the ark
- I'd really, really have to take your word for that, but again - the whole world? Still, if you did limit your animals to domesticated, then you'd probably be fine...but that's not what they say.*It is physically possible to fit enough dry food on the boat.
- again, scale...and a reed boat? wouldn't stay dry.*not sure if any food for carnivores was needed.
- er...haha. no food for carnivores? Look, if you didn't, you'd need more of your carnivore-food-type animals. a lot more.*It is physically possible to muck out and man the boat for this much more limited # of animals.
- scale!*Who said that Noah did not hire people to help him make the boat?
- god did? (i.e. correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the bible said Noah built it himself over 40 years?)*It is physically possible for a giant river flood (plus a possible landslide generated tsunami) to occur
- sure! but the world? gates of heaven? floating water canopy?*It is physically possible for a small group and survivors from outside the flood area to repopulate Sumer.
- sure, but the world? across the oceans AFTER the fact? sigh - I never said it didn't happen, or if I did I apologize. I meant that it couldn't have literally happened the way the bible literally says it did and the way many people here insist it must have.I have no problem, no problems at all, with somebody telling me that the bible is essentially a work of fiction, the story written by bronze-age man in an attempt to describe the world around them, to collect their oral history together and to use it to educate a people about their ancestors and culture.The issue is when people insist, flying in the face of possibility, of everything we know about the world, that what it says makes sense even according to the rules we know and therefore we must bow to their stories and change our minds on their hearsay.The scientific method does not work this way, and it's as close to blasphemy (for a familiar term for you) as a scientist can get. Either we use the scientific method, or we don't.I don't get this - if you want to say "it was magic" or "godidit", that's fine! Really it is!Just stop, please, from trying to force the scientists to kowtow to a scroll.

really, the subtitle says it all. I don't know what sort of magic reeds you would use, but all the boats I know about made of reeds would never be anywhere near large enough to hold an actual population of animals for a year without getting water-logged and sinking.Anyway, you're pretty much saying it wasn't the whole world but an arbitrarily small part of it.I'm fine with that - it wouldn't be a year, it wouldn't be impossibly big, it wouldn't hold everything...the story would be the fictionalized account of a real event, and with that I'm fine.The problem is that there are many, many people on this board and others who don't think that. They think it meant the whole world, they think it meant a water-canopy somewhere above the sky, they think it meant literally all the animals of the world (and forget that all the plants would die) - AND then they insist that our science is insignificant when compared to the force^w^w faith.

You were given examples of reed boats, made last century to test such theories, that basically sank because they became waterlogged, soggy and fell to pieces, and they were much, much smaller than what you're positing.Even the small ones (which apparently last from 4 to 9 months when built by people who have used them continually for thousands of years - these guys are the masters of that craft and they still don't last a year) get water-logged (it's their *nature*) and to claim that reeds magically repel water is ridiculous.As always, it's not whether a boat could have carried some animals, it's whether a boat, even made from reeds, would last a year (it wouldn't), could be made that size (the maths seem to say it couldn't without collapsing under it's own weight), let alone carry all the animals of the world.The account in the bible, if taken literally, is many orders of magnitude beyond that (and talks about a different boat material besides)If you want to posit a smaller boat of believable size, made of alternative but real, known materials, holding breeding pairs of some animals, making a journey of even several months, then that's fine - but it's a far, far cry from the bible's account.I repeat, because this is the important part: the boat described in the bible was too large to be feasible, not large enough for the task and not capable physically.That's all that's needed - if you want to abandon the literal nature of the bible, we won't stop you, but to insist that it's a scientific, literal account? No.

grasping at...straw?O:-)no, he's stuck in a loop - the ancient shipbuilders obviously had higher technology than people today, even people today who still build reed ships because fuck you that's why.

dear greentwiga - you are moving the goalposts. You are changing the conditions. I can't keep up with that.If you're happy that the account in the bible is impossible, I'll bow out. There's nothing more I need to say.

Ah, so, it's all literally true, except where it's not.so it's literally true that he made a boat from wood and tar, but it could still be made of reeds.He could still literally have made a boat 30 cubits high and 5 across (or whatever the distances measured in the bible are) but it's not literally that big.The whole world could still have literally flooded higher than the highest hill and the ark could have come to rest on mount Ararat as it literally says in the bible...except it was obviously in Sumer because the bible is literally correct even when it's not....look, I'm sorry - either it's literally true like so many people here say it is, or it is not literally true.You CANNOT have your cake and eat it.Is the bible:1) literally true in every word2) NOT literally true in every wordchoose 1 or 2. They ARE mutually exclusive. It's either an accurate statement of fact, or it is a fictionalized account.If you say #1 is your choice, then YOU are wrong on the location, building materials, size of "floating object", class of "floating object" and the extent of the flooding and rescue effort, and the duration of the event.If #2, then please try to understand I'm agreeing with you, but that your objections to my statements are pointless - we've both just agreed it's not literally true as written.