Summations Only

You've come up with an idea. An idea, by the way, that seems to be, ahem, full of holes. But, why don't you test it and see what happens? Scale it down, weave yourself a boat that will support yourself on a pond or lake, and see how it works. Then, if you can make that type of floating kludge work, scale up, see what it would take to keep an elephant, an elephant's mate, elephant food and elephant dung afloat (or to let the elephant dung pass through the weave). If you can make that work, take a look at how large the kludge is, and try to see how your idea begins to sink under the weight of all the biomass that would have to be on the boat to get the animals we see today, regardless of how you define "kinds."

Well, either God could help him, or he could use his God-given intelligence and keep trying until he comes up with a way to make it work, or after the millionth iteration, decide it's just not possible unless it's a miracle, in which case the whole debate stops being a science one and becomes a question of why the flood was necessary in the first place if God could use a miracle to just kill everyone who was "wicked."

Rather than a "if it ain't been done then it's not doable" mentality, I thin it's more a long the lines of, "IF it was done once, why wouldn't they have continued doing so?"If Noah learned some special way of building boats, and his family was all that was left after the Flud, why didn't this knowledge survive? Did they decide it was a great method, but no one would ever need to sail on a big body of water again, so it wasn't a necessary thing to know?

Did Thor Hyerdahl make a reed boat in the dimensions described in the Bible? The problem, if he didn't, is the same for traditional wooden vessels, just scaling up and assuming the same reactions is problematic and in most cases wrong.

Your link says they had to make assumptions about the size of a cubit. So, how does their assumptions coming out ok have any bearing on the actual size of the ark as described in the Bible when the size of the cubit assumed is not the size it probably was?

I'm not sure. I have no way of knowing how the people at that time and in that place measured a cubit. Others with a better understanding can look at this claim. I was merely pointing out that basing an argument on an assumption that yields a "perfect" result is less than convincing.Also, they based their shape of the ark on people who claim to have seen the ark on Mt. Ararat. Considering I'm convinced the ark is not on Ararat, this again fails to convince me.Also, they acknowledge that their techniques assumed for shipbuilding were based on modern techniques and technology, while saying they assume the actual builders did not have access to these techniques or technologies. They assume that maybe trees grew differently in the past than they do now.They also have no actual practical experiemnts, all of it is done using math, which we have shown don't work in actual practice because a wooden ship of that size seems to work out on paper, but when put into sea, it leaks because of factors not included in the math.All in all, this whole page starts with assumptions built on assumptions leading to math of dubious accuracy in real world applpications to create an answer they were sure of from the start.