Noah's Ark: The Flawed Literalist Interpretation

[Isolated China]

The fact someone had to post an entire explanation of why a literalist interpretation of Noah's Ark was impossible astounds me.
How could ANYONE take it as literal, that a boat made of wood, and smaller than the Titanic, could somehow store all available animal species and supplies for a year?

If I'm honest, I had a hard time writing some of it, purely because I detest explaining things rendered impossible by common sense.

At one point I just wanted to break down and say "WELL ISN'T THIS ALL BLOODY OBVIOUS ANYWAY?"

I do applaud you though on taking the time to think out and write this explanation. I'm not calling it an argument, because quite frankly, there's nothing to argue about it.

It does make me sad though, that 61% of Americans take the story literally. I wonder if Europe's gotten any better......

The fact someone had to post an entire explanation of why a literalist interpretation of Noah's Ark was impossible astounds me.
How could ANYONE take it as literal, that a boat made of wood, and smaller than the Titanic, could somehow store all available animal species and supplies for a year?

Why does it matter if it's even taken literally in the first place? As symbolism, there's still a plethora of reasoning as to why it's a shitty story that deserves nothing but contempt.

True, the story even in symbolism DOES suck. The fact that everything except for 8 people and 2 of each animal species dies to make the world a 'better place' somehow sound's like a fallacy in-and-of-itself.

[Union of Democratic Socialists]

It is possible that a regional flood did happen in the ancient Middle East where Noah lived. It would also be easier to explain how all the animals arrived. The Jews just miss wrote the story and said it was the whole world. For they only knew (and cared) about what happened near them. Besides most of the flaws in the Bible happen in the Old Testament, so they can be blamed on the ignorance of the Jews. The Global flood did not happen but a major regional flood could have happened in the time of Noah.

[Malfyria]

Glorious.

[Nationalist State of Knox]

The Flood was clearly the first step in the EU's master plan to set up the NWO.

Doesn't Gilgamesh sound just a little too much like...

Bilderberg?

Jesus heretic-eviscerating Christ.

They've even got similar letters and everything!

[Nationalist State of Knox]

It is possible that a regional flood did happen in the ancient Middle East where Noah lived. It would also be easier to explain how all the animals arrived. The Jews just miss wrote the story and said it was the whole world. For they only knew (and cared) about what happened near them. Besides most of the flaws in the Bible happen in the Old Testament, so they can be blamed on the ignorance of the Jews. The Global flood did not happen but a major regional flood could have happened in the time of Noah.

Assuming Noah existed, and he's not the generic "hero" who appears in all of the Flood Myths.

[Grave_n_idle]

It is possible that a regional flood did happen in the ancient Middle East where Noah lived. It would also be easier to explain how all the animals arrived. The Jews just miss wrote the story and said it was the whole world. For they only knew (and cared) about what happened near them. Besides most of the flaws in the Bible happen in the Old Testament, so they can be blamed on the ignorance of the Jews. The Global flood did not happen but a major regional flood could have happened in the time of Noah.

Regional floods happen just about everywhere, sooner or later, so it's pretty certain there would have been major ones within either recent memory, or oral history, when the accounts were first committed to paper.

[Condunum]

If I'm honest, I had a hard time writing some of it, purely because I detest explaining things rendered impossible by common sense.

At one point I just wanted to break down and say "WELL ISN'T THIS ALL BLOODY OBVIOUS ANYWAY?"

I do applaud you though on taking the time to think out and write this explanation. I'm not calling it an argument, because quite frankly, there's nothing to argue about it.

It does make me sad though, that 61% of Americans take the story literally. I wonder if Europe's gotten any better......

Why does it matter if it's even taken literally in the first place? As symbolism, there's still a plethora of reasoning as to why it's a shitty story that deserves nothing but contempt.

True, the story even in symbolism DOES suck. The fact that everything except for 8 people and 2 of each animal species dies to make the world a 'better place' somehow sound's like a fallacy in-and-of-itself.

And it doesn't even stop at the flood, really. Any story of the bible that is criticized as morally wrong cannot be reconciled as symbolism. How much better is a god who uses omnicide as symbolism than one who actually commits omnicide?

[Nationalist State of Knox]

I do applaud you though on taking the time to think out and write this explanation. I'm not calling it an argument, because quite frankly, there's nothing to argue about it.

It does make me sad though, that 61% of Americans take the story literally. I wonder if Europe's gotten any better......


True, the story even in symbolism DOES suck. The fact that everything except for 8 people and 2 of each animal species dies to make the world a 'better place' somehow sound's like a fallacy in-and-of-itself.

And it doesn't even stop at the flood, really. Any story of the bible that is criticized as morally wrong cannot be reconciled as symbolism. How much better is a god who uses omnicide as symbolism than one who actually commits omnicide?

Can someone please explain to me what this story is supposed to be symbolism for? It doesn't carry a particularly positive message.

[Of the Free Socialist Territories]

And it doesn't even stop at the flood, really. Any story of the bible that is criticized as morally wrong cannot be reconciled as symbolism. How much better is a god who uses omnicide as symbolism than one who actually commits omnicide?

Can someone please explain to me what this story is supposed to be symbolism for? It doesn't carry a particularly positive message.

• Something something something sin.
• Breaking eggs, making omelettes.
• Something something clean animals.
• See how durable a building material good wood actually is.
• Mount Ararat is great at this time of year.
• Ravens are unreliable bastards.
• It's important to teach children to swim.
• Family holidays are best holidays.
• It kind of puts your problems getting pets transported across national borders into perspective.
• Journalism was worse in those there days.
• God keeps his promises. Especially if those promises involve killing people.

I think that's all the potential symbolism and lessons you can extract.

[Orham]

Water: A lot of it

The first problem demonstrated by this account is water, or rather, the sheer quantity of it. The account explains how "all the high mountains under the heavens were covered", which, of course, implies that the water level was higher than Mount Everest, the Earth's highest mountain. Taking into account that the surface area of the Earth is 510 million kilometres, and acknowledging that the height of Mount Everest is 8.848km , we can perform as basic volume calculation, revealing that the total volume of water required to flood the Earth to such an extent is 4,512,480,000 cubic kilometres of water. In comparison, the present volume of water on the Earth (i.e in oceans, lakes etc) is 1,338,000,000 cubic kilometres, meaning that approximately 3.4 times the Earth's current water volume came out of absolutely nowhere. That's right, nowhere.

That's not all of it as well. The account details that the flooding process occurred for "forty days", meaning that approximately 112,812,000 cubic kilometres fell per day, 4,700,500 per hour, 78,342 per minute and 1306 per second. At any one time, the Earth's atmosphere holds approximately 12,900 cubic kilometres of water, which means that during the flood, approximately six times the Earth's atmosphere's water volume was falling every minute.

Of course, there's also the problem of where 4.5 billion cubic kilometres of water actually went. The floodwaters began to fall on the 17th day of אייר or "Iyyar", a 29 day month, and had fully receded by the 27th of that month one year afterwards. This puts the duration of the flood at 394 days, allowing us to calculate that it took 204 days for the waters to fully recede. This means that at a rate of 22,120,000 cubic kilometres per day, this water was evaporating into the atmosphere. However, the Bible offers no explanation where this water 34,980 times the average volume of water in the atmosphere actually went. Did it dissipate into space? Improbable, considering that the occasional water molecule only ever leaves the atmosphere to space by being broken into its respective hydrogen and oxygen atoms by ultraviolet radiation; a process almost completely stopped by the Earth's protective ozone layer. The atmosphere would no doubt be unable to cope with that volume of water, condensing and thus creating even more precipitation in an endless cycle.

Essentially, unless we disregard the fact that the atmosphere can't physically contain that volume of water without it falling as rain, the water vapour present would render the air unbreathable, as well as cause global temperatures to plummet by reflecting the sun's rays.

In order to understand this clearly, you must understand another crucial fact: God just so happens to be an epic cross-classed spellcaster of an incredible level and who also happens to have an equally astonishing number of spell-storing rings and feats designed to maximize His spell count per day. He opened several interplanar gates to the elemental plane of water, which you will no doubt correctly assume to have an unlimited supply of water. This is how He managed to produce a seemingly impossible amount of water with which to flood the Earth.

Getting to your question about the flow rate, that's simply a matter of opening a sufficient number of interplanar gates (each individual one constituting a hoop ranging from 5-20 feet in diameter). Arranging the gates in such a fashion as water flowing out into the material plane from any given gate does not return to the elemental plane of water by flowing into a different gate would be a trivial matter, and so the necessary flow rate is indeed reachable. Opening a single gate is a standard action (taking roughly 1 second), and since there are 86,400 seconds in a day there was more than sufficient time to open the necessary number of gates.

Now, you may ask just how it is that God managed to establish gates all around the world in a timely fashion. A fair question, and easily answered. God had several pairs of boots of teleportation prepared and set out at pre-planned positions, changing their design to sandals in order to maximize the rate at which any given pair could be donned or removed. In this way God managed to travel from one location on the planet to another in a much more timely fashion than either overland flight could ever hope to provide. However, just to cover His bases and ensure that his movements would be rapid and free enough, God cast a combination of haste, expeditious retreat, and air walk on Himself whenever necessary.

Another question you may ask is how God managed to create rainstorms lasting the described duration. A simple cast of control weather is capable of accomplishing such a feat. The torrential rain option would become justifiably globally accessible as flooding continued, though it would initially be accessible only in locales which were in the midst of summer as per the limitations of the spell.

The final point you've raised, which is the question of where the water went after the flooding had finally ended, is answered again with interdimensional gates. This time, however, the gates led to a different plane of existence: the infinite layers of the abyss. As the abyss features an infinite amount of space the introduction of such a large quantity of water would have a minimal effect upon the plane as a whole, instead only leading to localized disarray. And considering the abyss is a wretched nest of evil beings, God took no issue with this notion. Angels were posted at each gate to ensure that the denizens of the abyss did not escape their prison.

The Ark

Noah was instructed to construct his "Ark" based on an archaic unit of measurement known as the cubit. There are several variants of the cubit, the Biblical one being the "Near Eastern Cubit", which is approximately 18 inches (around 0.45 metres). The Bible states that the Ark was "three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high." Converting these into modern metric measurements, the ark was 135x22.5x13.5 metres. Noah is also instructed to make the ark out of "cypress", a reference to a family of conifer trees known as "Cupressaceae", and despite specifying what type of wood it was to be made out of, made no plans for a rudder or any other type of steering mechanisms. So, in summary, God instructed Noah to construct a ship 135 metres long, made of wood, with no method for steering at all, and this ark was to carry every animal species in existence.

By way of comparison, a modern Nimitz aircraft carrier is 332.8 metres long and can carry up to 90 aircraft, despite being over 2.5 times the size of this legendary ark. Not only that, but constructing the ark out of wood makes it relatively flimsy in comparison, and combined with the lack of a steering mechanism, it's fair to say that the ark wouldn't have lasted long as the Earth rapidly flooded in what would have resulted in intense storm waters.

A great deal of assistance was offered to Noah by the Lord with regard to these valid questions. I shall explain.

Beginning with the issue of the ship's cargo-to-volume ratio and the care of the animals, one must bear in mind that a plethora of spells and magic items can mitigate this problem. The reduce animal spell reduced the creatures' individual caloric intake requirements and enabled them to fit onto the ark. The creatures were whisked out of the material plane into extraplanar pocket dimensions through extensive use of the rope trick spell. As the space of any such pocket dimension is sufficient to hold eight creatures of any size, a creature's mass and body volume become immaterial to the question of whether it would be possible to store them. And considering God's astonishingly high caster level and rope trick's lack of a duration cap, recasting of the rope trick spell constitutes a minor concern. Food and drink for the creatures and crew was provided by several cabinets of feasting. Environmental considerations for the creatures could be provided for through various spells aimed at raising or lowering local temperatures, generating water/stone, and so forth. The rope trick spell does not disallow the introduction of inanimate objects into the pocket dimension and only places a cap on the quantity of creatures which may enter, so no additional tweaking of the pocket dimension was necessary.

The next question to be addressed is the toughness of the vessel. True, the ark was made of cypress wood, but this was principally an aesthetic choice on the part of the Lord. The vessel's toughness was provided for by supplementary magic, specifically the ironwood spell. This gives the cypress vessel the toughness of a steel ship while leaving the pleasant cypress appearance and scent. The steering was provided for by the Lord as well, so no rudder was even required. Specifically, careful use of the control water spell was employed to steer the ark with the surrounding water itself. You may think that a strange way to provide for the steering of a ship, and I am inclined to agree. It is my opinion that the Lord was engaging in a bit of showing off on this particular point.

Animals

Having touched on animals in my last section, I shall go into greater detail here. As of 2010, there were 1.7 million known animal species, and the number has no doubt increased over the past 3 years. In fact, it is estimated that there are over 8.7 million non-bacterial species in the world today. Of course, this raises numerous problems for the feasibility of the story once this is put into perspective, and numerous questions are raised.

Firstly, how did Noah collect "two of all living creatures" of approximately 8.7 million animal species? Assuming, of course, we're not ignoring the fact that God instructed Noah to "bring" them onto the ark himself, contrary to the belief that they actually came to Noah of their own will (which still has several problems I'll discuss soon).
Assuming Noah actually did collect 8.7 million species, not only does it mean he was the discoverer of the Americas, but in fact he was the greatest zoologist to have ever lived.
This man, in his early 600s, would have had to immobilise polar bears and transport them from the arctic to an isolated area in ancient Mesopotamia. Even if this process took 100 years, and Noah spent this entire time without any sleep (the average human will last 2 weeks before dying of sleep deprivation), he would have had to collect 238 species per day or 10 new species per hour, something not physically possible considering the time required to both travel to the location of these species and capture them (assuming none were hostile and decided to kill Noah, which many of them would have).

However, if we assume that Noah didn't collect all of the animals himself, numerous problems are still posed; for example, how did sloths travel 12000 kilometres (as the crow flies) from Central America to the area of modern-day Iraq. As comical as the idea is of a sloth, a famously slow and lazy animal, traversing the Atlantic Ocean, it frankly remains nonsensical to suggest a sloth could do so. On the other hand, one could suggest the sloth travelled up into Alaska to Chukotka (still required to traverse some water) in conditions considerably colder than what it is acclimatised to, without any of its natural habitat or nutrition, meaning that it would die pretty quickly.

In addition, many species will have had to have been collected hundreds of times, in order to provide food for the carnivorous species on the ship, which goes directly against God's commands to only take two of each species on board. Noah would have also had to cater for the specific survival needs of every animal on his vessel, providing the exact dietary requirement for 8.7 million species whilst keeping the vessel at a temperature they can survive in, which is something that would no doubt be difficult to achieve considering the 135 metre-long wooden vessel wouldn't have contained the necessary means to control said temperature for every single animal.

It's also worth noting that the Bible assumes that all species possess both male and female variants, something which is demonstrably false. By saying so, the Bible demonstrates that it knows nothing of hermaphroditic species or those capable of performing autogamy (or self-reproduction), and thus highlights the Bible's complete lack of understanding about basic biology, suggesting that it is less of the work of a divine being but rather a fallible human author from no earlier than 1500 bc.

Such technicalities aside, let's just put this into perspective: the absolute maximumvolume of the ark was 41006.25 cubic metres (based on the previous measurements), and this is assuming that the ark was a perfect box shape. Now, taking into account 2x8.7 million=17.4 million (2 of every animal), we can work out approximately how much space each animal had, if (and that's a big "if") we ignore the living room for Noah, his family and 394 days worth of supplies for these animals. Dividing the volume by the number of animals, we work out that the volume per animal would come to approximately 0.0024 cubic metres. So, assuming Noah did manage to get every animal on board, they would've either died of suffocation or being crushed.

We have resolved all but two problems here already. The remaining problems are:

(a) The text oversimplifies reproductive biology
(b) Collection of the world's creatures would be an impossibly difficult endeavor

The first issue is simply a problem of the Lord's poor taste in ghost writers. The reason the Lord left this in the final draft was to teach a valuable lesson to everyone: if you use a ghost writer, edit and proofread the work personally prior to releasing it with your name on the cover.

Collection of the world's animals is also fairly simple. God equipped Noah with boots of teleportation, rods of sleep, and several scrolls of heal and greater invisibility. He was also given a crystal ball to aid in finding the desired creatures. Noah proceeded to turn invisible, cause the desired creatures to fall unconscious, and teleport them back to the ark to be placed in a pocket dimension. It was still a daunting task, but not nearly as difficult.

Fun Fact: The real story of how Noah collected the creatures was the original inspiration for the hit video game/television series Pokemon.

What about the plants?

As I'm sure you'll notice from reading it, the Genesis Account makes no reference to what happened to plant life during the flood. Unless Noah collected all plant life on Earth, which is even more ridiculous than him storing all animal life, we can assume that the account implies that plants remained relatively unaffected by the floodwaters, managing to survive over a year submerged 8.8km beneath the water level. Of course, to believe that this was possible essentially requires you to know nothing about basic plant biology.

Firstly, terrestrial plant life is enabled to perform its basic functions through gaseous exchange, using its stomata to absorb carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, allowing it to produce vital glucose for aerobic respiration. Aquatic plants, however, absorb carbon dioxide that is dissolved in water in four forms: carbon dioxide, carbonic acid, and carbonate and bicarbonate ions. Due to a notable difference between water and air carbon dioxide levels (i.e water has considerably less carbon dioxide than water), combined with terrestrial plants' lack of adapted exchanged surfaces to absorb carbon dioxide from the water, photosynthesis couldn't continue, at least at a rate that would allow the plant to survive for over a year.

Secondly, even with sufficient carbon dioxide, plants still require light to photosynthesise. Of course, light levels decrease substantially the further down one goes through the aquatic layers. If we compare the approximate depth of water at the time of the Flood with an actual location, the Puerto Rico Trench would be suitable, an oceanic trench with a depth of 8.8km. This depth in standard terms of aquatic layers is known as the "Hadal zone", which begins at depths of 6km and greater. In terms of the other layers, the Mesopelagic, the zone between 200 and 1000 metres, still doesn't receive enough light necessary to allow photosynthesis to take place. In the Hadal Zone (or Hadopelagic), sunlight is completely absent, making photosynthesis impossible.

If that isn't enough to convince you, the pressure of the Hadal Zone can reach around 1100 atmospheres (i.e. 1100 times standard atmospheric pressure). Such a pressure would completely crush the plants, effectively destroying them regardless of the limiting factors of photosynthesis.

So, in summary, as a result of a lack of carbon dioxide, light and immense pressure, the Global Flood would have completely eradicated all plant life on Earth. Still, that didn't stop Noah's dove from bringing him back a "freshly plucked olive leaf", did it?

Noah was only responsible for the creatures, the Lord took care of the plants. The needed plant samples were collected by God before Noah had even set out to collect the first creature on his list, as God has access to the time stop spell. The plant samples were cared for in a similar fashion to how Noah cared for the creatures, and after the last of the excess water had drained into the abyss the Lord promptly used a combination of time stop, the plant growth spell, and control weather to bring the Earth's plant life, its distribution, and the climates back to their original states.

Repopulation

If we somehow ignore the fact that, at this point, the Earth should be a wasteland devoid of plant life and the air should be saturated with water vapour to the extent that the air is unbreathable, and we excuse the fact that Noah had beat the impossible odds of collecting 8.7 million animal species and they weren't crushed to death on his wooden vessel that couldn't be navigated, we have to recognise that they would have to return to where they came from, despite being in the middle of ancient Mesopotamia.

Take, for example, the Walrus; there are only two in existence as of the Flood's end. It doesn't exactly take a zoologist to recognise that walruses aren't exactly adapted to traverse arid environments; in fact, quite the opposite. The walruses' lack of mobility (due to their immense bulk) combined with a lack of natural prey and overheating in post-flood Mesopotamia would result in the walrus' extinction. I can confirm that as of 2013, living walruses still exist.

In fact, all land carnivores would've died out within a day or two, due to a complete lack of nutrition. Those who argue that carnivores suddenly started consuming plant material, clearly don't understand that they can't efficiently digest plant material, many even not being able to digest it at all.

Only the few herbivorous or omnivorous animals lucky enough to be adapted to the Near East environment could have possibly survived to repopulate; once again assuming that all plant life wasn't completely destroyed. Still, the chances of fully repopulating with only two members of the species is incredibly slim, as one death would've resulted in that species' extinction.

The Lord simply teleported each creature back to its original habitat, which He had just recently restored using plant growth and control weather. Not a problem.

I sincerely hope your faith has been restored by this serious and completely scientifically/theologically sound explanation of the literal flood of the Earth by God.

[Grave_n_idle]

And it doesn't even stop at the flood, really. Any story of the bible that is criticized as morally wrong cannot be reconciled as symbolism. How much better is a god who uses omnicide as symbolism than one who actually commits omnicide?

Can someone please explain to me what this story is supposed to be symbolism for? It doesn't carry a particularly positive message.

What they taught at my daughter's church, was that the Ark story was proof that God keeps his promises.

The other version I've heard is that, just as Adam is a 'type' of Jesus, the Ark is a type of the Rapture.

[Condunum]

Can someone please explain to me what this story is supposed to be symbolism for? It doesn't carry a particularly positive message.

What they taught at my daughter's church, was that the Ark story was proof that God keeps his promises.

The other version I've heard is that, just as Adam is a 'type' of Jesus, the Ark is a type of the Rapture.

I'd always heard the same thing. I personally find that contradictory with being of perfect morality, considering that, while it makes him consistent, it doesn't make him just.

[Grave_n_idle]

[*]Breaking eggs, making omelettes.[/list]

Like they say, you can't make an omelette without brutally murdering millions of people.

*nods*

[Condunum]

Water: A lot of it

The first problem demonstrated by this account is water, or rather, the sheer quantity of it. The account explains how "all the high mountains under the heavens were covered", which, of course, implies that the water level was higher than Mount Everest, the Earth's highest mountain. Taking into account that the surface area of the Earth is 510 million kilometres, and acknowledging that the height of Mount Everest is 8.848km , we can perform as basic volume calculation, revealing that the total volume of water required to flood the Earth to such an extent is 4,512,480,000 cubic kilometres of water. In comparison, the present volume of water on the Earth (i.e in oceans, lakes etc) is 1,338,000,000 cubic kilometres, meaning that approximately 3.4 times the Earth's current water volume came out of absolutely nowhere. That's right, nowhere.

That's not all of it as well. The account details that the flooding process occurred for "forty days", meaning that approximately 112,812,000 cubic kilometres fell per day, 4,700,500 per hour, 78,342 per minute and 1306 per second. At any one time, the Earth's atmosphere holds approximately 12,900 cubic kilometres of water, which means that during the flood, approximately six times the Earth's atmosphere's water volume was falling every minute.

Of course, there's also the problem of where 4.5 billion cubic kilometres of water actually went. The floodwaters began to fall on the 17th day of אייר or "Iyyar", a 29 day month, and had fully receded by the 27th of that month one year afterwards. This puts the duration of the flood at 394 days, allowing us to calculate that it took 204 days for the waters to fully recede. This means that at a rate of 22,120,000 cubic kilometres per day, this water was evaporating into the atmosphere. However, the Bible offers no explanation where this water 34,980 times the average volume of water in the atmosphere actually went. Did it dissipate into space? Improbable, considering that the occasional water molecule only ever leaves the atmosphere to space by being broken into its respective hydrogen and oxygen atoms by ultraviolet radiation; a process almost completely stopped by the Earth's protective ozone layer. The atmosphere would no doubt be unable to cope with that volume of water, condensing and thus creating even more precipitation in an endless cycle.

Essentially, unless we disregard the fact that the atmosphere can't physically contain that volume of water without it falling as rain, the water vapour present would render the air unbreathable, as well as cause global temperatures to plummet by reflecting the sun's rays.

In order to understand this clearly, you must understand another crucial fact: God just so happens to be an epic cross-classed spellcaster of an incredible level and who also happens to have an equally astonishing number of spell-storing rings and feats designed to maximize His spell count per day. He opened several interplanar gates to the elemental plane of water, which you will no doubt correctly assume to have an unlimited supply of water. This is how He managed to produce a seemingly impossible amount of water with which to flood the Earth.

Getting to your question about the flow rate, that's simply a matter of opening a sufficient number of interplanar gates (each individual one constituting a hoop ranging from 5-20 feet in diameter). Arranging the gates in such a fashion as water flowing out into the material plane from any given gate does not return to the elemental plane of water by flowing into a different gate would be a trivial matter, and so the necessary flow rate is indeed reachable. Opening a single gate is a standard action (taking roughly 1 second), and since there are 86,400 seconds in a day there was more than sufficient time to open the necessary number of gates.

Now, you may ask just how it is that God managed to establish gates all around the world in a timely fashion. A fair question, and easily answered. God had several pairs of boots of teleportation prepared and set out at pre-planned positions, changing their design to sandals in order to maximize the rate at which any given pair could be donned or removed. In this way God managed to travel from one location on the planet to another in a much more timely fashion than either overland flight could ever hope to provide. However, just to cover His bases and ensure that his movements would be rapid and free enough, God cast a combination of haste, expeditious retreat, and air walk on Himself whenever necessary.

Another question you may ask is how God managed to create rainstorms lasting the described duration. A simple cast of control weather is capable of accomplishing such a feat. The torrential rain option would become justifiably globally accessible as flooding continued, though it would initially be accessible only in locales which were in the midst of summer as per the limitations of the spell.

The final point you've raised, which is the question of where the water went after the flooding had finally ended, is answered again with interdimensional gates. This time, however, the gates led to a different plane of existence: the infinite layers of the abyss. As the abyss features an infinite amount of space the introduction of such a large quantity of water would have a minimal effect upon the plane as a whole, instead only leading to localized disarray. And considering the abyss is a wretched nest of evil beings, God took no issue with this notion. Angels were posted at each gate to ensure that the denizens of the abyss did not escape their prison.

The Ark

Noah was instructed to construct his "Ark" based on an archaic unit of measurement known as the cubit. There are several variants of the cubit, the Biblical one being the "Near Eastern Cubit", which is approximately 18 inches (around 0.45 metres). The Bible states that the Ark was "three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high." Converting these into modern metric measurements, the ark was 135x22.5x13.5 metres. Noah is also instructed to make the ark out of "cypress", a reference to a family of conifer trees known as "Cupressaceae", and despite specifying what type of wood it was to be made out of, made no plans for a rudder or any other type of steering mechanisms. So, in summary, God instructed Noah to construct a ship 135 metres long, made of wood, with no method for steering at all, and this ark was to carry every animal species in existence.

By way of comparison, a modern Nimitz aircraft carrier is 332.8 metres long and can carry up to 90 aircraft, despite being over 2.5 times the size of this legendary ark. Not only that, but constructing the ark out of wood makes it relatively flimsy in comparison, and combined with the lack of a steering mechanism, it's fair to say that the ark wouldn't have lasted long as the Earth rapidly flooded in what would have resulted in intense storm waters.

A great deal of assistance was offered to Noah by the Lord with regard to these valid questions. I shall explain.

Beginning with the issue of the ship's cargo-to-volume ratio and the care of the animals, one must bear in mind that a plethora of spells and magic items can mitigate this problem. The reduce animal spell reduced the creatures' individual caloric intake requirements and enabled them to fit onto the ark. The creatures were whisked out of the material plane into extraplanar pocket dimensions through extensive use of the rope trick spell. As the space of any such pocket dimension is sufficient to hold eight creatures of any size, a creature's mass and body volume become immaterial to the question of whether it would be possible to store them. And considering God's astonishingly high caster level and rope trick's lack of a duration cap, recasting of the rope trick spell constitutes a minor concern. Food and drink for the creatures and crew was provided by several cabinets of feasting. Environmental considerations for the creatures could be provided for through various spells aimed at raising or lowering local temperatures, generating water/stone, and so forth. The rope trick spell does not disallow the introduction of inanimate objects into the pocket dimension and only places a cap on the quantity of creatures which may enter, so no additional tweaking of the pocket dimension was necessary.

The next question to be addressed is the toughness of the vessel. True, the ark was made of cypress wood, but this was principally an aesthetic choice on the part of the Lord. The vessel's toughness was provided for by supplementary magic, specifically the ironwood spell. This gives the cypress vessel the toughness of a steel ship while leaving the pleasant cypress appearance and scent. The steering was provided for by the Lord as well, so no rudder was even required. Specifically, careful use of the control water spell was employed to steer the ark with the surrounding water itself. You may think that a strange way to provide for the steering of a ship, and I am inclined to agree. It is my opinion that the Lord was engaging in a bit of showing off on this particular point.

Animals

Having touched on animals in my last section, I shall go into greater detail here. As of 2010, there were 1.7 million known animal species, and the number has no doubt increased over the past 3 years. In fact, it is estimated that there are over 8.7 million non-bacterial species in the world today. Of course, this raises numerous problems for the feasibility of the story once this is put into perspective, and numerous questions are raised.

Firstly, how did Noah collect "two of all living creatures" of approximately 8.7 million animal species? Assuming, of course, we're not ignoring the fact that God instructed Noah to "bring" them onto the ark himself, contrary to the belief that they actually came to Noah of their own will (which still has several problems I'll discuss soon).
Assuming Noah actually did collect 8.7 million species, not only does it mean he was the discoverer of the Americas, but in fact he was the greatest zoologist to have ever lived.
This man, in his early 600s, would have had to immobilise polar bears and transport them from the arctic to an isolated area in ancient Mesopotamia. Even if this process took 100 years, and Noah spent this entire time without any sleep (the average human will last 2 weeks before dying of sleep deprivation), he would have had to collect 238 species per day or 10 new species per hour, something not physically possible considering the time required to both travel to the location of these species and capture them (assuming none were hostile and decided to kill Noah, which many of them would have).

However, if we assume that Noah didn't collect all of the animals himself, numerous problems are still posed; for example, how did sloths travel 12000 kilometres (as the crow flies) from Central America to the area of modern-day Iraq. As comical as the idea is of a sloth, a famously slow and lazy animal, traversing the Atlantic Ocean, it frankly remains nonsensical to suggest a sloth could do so. On the other hand, one could suggest the sloth travelled up into Alaska to Chukotka (still required to traverse some water) in conditions considerably colder than what it is acclimatised to, without any of its natural habitat or nutrition, meaning that it would die pretty quickly.

In addition, many species will have had to have been collected hundreds of times, in order to provide food for the carnivorous species on the ship, which goes directly against God's commands to only take two of each species on board. Noah would have also had to cater for the specific survival needs of every animal on his vessel, providing the exact dietary requirement for 8.7 million species whilst keeping the vessel at a temperature they can survive in, which is something that would no doubt be difficult to achieve considering the 135 metre-long wooden vessel wouldn't have contained the necessary means to control said temperature for every single animal.

It's also worth noting that the Bible assumes that all species possess both male and female variants, something which is demonstrably false. By saying so, the Bible demonstrates that it knows nothing of hermaphroditic species or those capable of performing autogamy (or self-reproduction), and thus highlights the Bible's complete lack of understanding about basic biology, suggesting that it is less of the work of a divine being but rather a fallible human author from no earlier than 1500 bc.

Such technicalities aside, let's just put this into perspective: the absolute maximumvolume of the ark was 41006.25 cubic metres (based on the previous measurements), and this is assuming that the ark was a perfect box shape. Now, taking into account 2x8.7 million=17.4 million (2 of every animal), we can work out approximately how much space each animal had, if (and that's a big "if") we ignore the living room for Noah, his family and 394 days worth of supplies for these animals. Dividing the volume by the number of animals, we work out that the volume per animal would come to approximately 0.0024 cubic metres. So, assuming Noah did manage to get every animal on board, they would've either died of suffocation or being crushed.

We have resolved all but two problems here already. The remaining problems are:

(a) The text oversimplifies reproductive biology
(b) Collection of the world's creatures would be an impossibly difficult endeavor

The first issue is simply a problem of the Lord's poor taste in ghost writers. The reason the Lord left this in the final draft was to teach a valuable lesson to everyone: if you use a ghost writer, edit and proofread the work personally prior to releasing it with your name on the cover.

Collection of the world's animals is also fairly simple. God equipped Noah with boots of teleportation, rods of sleep, and several scrolls of heal and greater invisibility. He was also given a crystal ball to aid in finding the desired creatures. Noah proceeded to turn invisible, cause the desired creatures to fall unconscious, and teleport them back to the ark to be placed in a pocket dimension. It was still a daunting task, but not nearly as difficult.

Fun Fact: The real story of how Noah collected the creatures was the original inspiration for the hit video game/television series Pokemon.

What about the plants?

As I'm sure you'll notice from reading it, the Genesis Account makes no reference to what happened to plant life during the flood. Unless Noah collected all plant life on Earth, which is even more ridiculous than him storing all animal life, we can assume that the account implies that plants remained relatively unaffected by the floodwaters, managing to survive over a year submerged 8.8km beneath the water level. Of course, to believe that this was possible essentially requires you to know nothing about basic plant biology.

Firstly, terrestrial plant life is enabled to perform its basic functions through gaseous exchange, using its stomata to absorb carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, allowing it to produce vital glucose for aerobic respiration. Aquatic plants, however, absorb carbon dioxide that is dissolved in water in four forms: carbon dioxide, carbonic acid, and carbonate and bicarbonate ions. Due to a notable difference between water and air carbon dioxide levels (i.e water has considerably less carbon dioxide than water), combined with terrestrial plants' lack of adapted exchanged surfaces to absorb carbon dioxide from the water, photosynthesis couldn't continue, at least at a rate that would allow the plant to survive for over a year.

Secondly, even with sufficient carbon dioxide, plants still require light to photosynthesise. Of course, light levels decrease substantially the further down one goes through the aquatic layers. If we compare the approximate depth of water at the time of the Flood with an actual location, the Puerto Rico Trench would be suitable, an oceanic trench with a depth of 8.8km. This depth in standard terms of aquatic layers is known as the "Hadal zone", which begins at depths of 6km and greater. In terms of the other layers, the Mesopelagic, the zone between 200 and 1000 metres, still doesn't receive enough light necessary to allow photosynthesis to take place. In the Hadal Zone (or Hadopelagic), sunlight is completely absent, making photosynthesis impossible.

If that isn't enough to convince you, the pressure of the Hadal Zone can reach around 1100 atmospheres (i.e. 1100 times standard atmospheric pressure). Such a pressure would completely crush the plants, effectively destroying them regardless of the limiting factors of photosynthesis.

So, in summary, as a result of a lack of carbon dioxide, light and immense pressure, the Global Flood would have completely eradicated all plant life on Earth. Still, that didn't stop Noah's dove from bringing him back a "freshly plucked olive leaf", did it?

Noah was only responsible for the creatures, the Lord took care of the plants. The needed plant samples were collected by God before Noah had even set out to collect the first creature on his list, as God has access to the time stop spell. The plant samples were cared for in a similar fashion to how Noah cared for the creatures, and after the last of the excess water had drained into the abyss the Lord promptly used a combination of time stop, the plant growth spell, and control weather to bring the Earth's plant life, its distribution, and the climates back to their original states.

Repopulation

If we somehow ignore the fact that, at this point, the Earth should be a wasteland devoid of plant life and the air should be saturated with water vapour to the extent that the air is unbreathable, and we excuse the fact that Noah had beat the impossible odds of collecting 8.7 million animal species and they weren't crushed to death on his wooden vessel that couldn't be navigated, we have to recognise that they would have to return to where they came from, despite being in the middle of ancient Mesopotamia.

Take, for example, the Walrus; there are only two in existence as of the Flood's end. It doesn't exactly take a zoologist to recognise that walruses aren't exactly adapted to traverse arid environments; in fact, quite the opposite. The walruses' lack of mobility (due to their immense bulk) combined with a lack of natural prey and overheating in post-flood Mesopotamia would result in the walrus' extinction. I can confirm that as of 2013, living walruses still exist.

In fact, all land carnivores would've died out within a day or two, due to a complete lack of nutrition. Those who argue that carnivores suddenly started consuming plant material, clearly don't understand that they can't efficiently digest plant material, many even not being able to digest it at all.

Only the few herbivorous or omnivorous animals lucky enough to be adapted to the Near East environment could have possibly survived to repopulate; once again assuming that all plant life wasn't completely destroyed. Still, the chances of fully repopulating with only two members of the species is incredibly slim, as one death would've resulted in that species' extinction.

The Lord simply teleported each creature back to its original habitat, which He had just recently restored using plant growth and control weather. Not a problem.

I sincerely hope your faith has been restored by this serious and completely scientifically/theologically sound explanation of the literal flood of the Earth by God.

Did you just use tabletop fantasy gaming terms to describe the great flood? I think I love you.

[Grave_n_idle]

What they taught at my daughter's church, was that the Ark story was proof that God keeps his promises.

The other version I've heard is that, just as Adam is a 'type' of Jesus, the Ark is a type of the Rapture.

I'd always heard the same thing. I personally find that contradictory with being of perfect morality, considering that, while it makes him consistent, it doesn't make him just.

Well, the argument is that they brought it on themselves, because of their wickedness - and wickedness separates you from God. It wasn't his fault, you see - it was you!

[Nationalist State of Knox]

[*]Breaking eggs, making omelettes.[/list]

Like they say, you can't make an omelette without brutally murdering millions of people.

*nods*

I'm sure Noah egged him on, though.

[Condunum]

I'd always heard the same thing. I personally find that contradictory with being of perfect morality, considering that, while it makes him consistent, it doesn't make him just.

Well, the argument is that they brought it on themselves, because of their wickedness - and wickedness separates you from God. It wasn't his fault, you see - it was you!

And all the babies he killed were wicked too. *nod*

[Of the Free Socialist Territories]

Like they say, you can't make an omelette without brutally murdering millions of people.

*nods*

I'm sure Noah egged him on, though.

That's a terrible yolk.

[Nationalist State of Knox]

Well, the argument is that they brought it on themselves, because of their wickedness - and wickedness separates you from God. It wasn't his fault, you see - it was you!

And all the babies he killed were wicked too. *nod*

Of course, Original Sin, remember? Babies are perfectly capable of making informed decisions.

[Of the Free Socialist Territories]

And all the babies he killed were wicked too. *nod*

Of course, Original Sin, remember? Babies are perfectly capable of making informed decisions.

It's why babies have the right to vote and are taxpaying citizens legally allowed to get paid jobs.

owait

[Nationalist State of Knox]

I'm sure Noah egged him on, though.

That's a terrible yolk.

That's a bit of an eggsaggeration.

[The Orson Empire]

Oh, this shit again.

[Condunum]

Oh, this shit again.

Yes, this again. It's no surprise that we're gonna point out stupidity in stories.

[Of the Free Socialist Territories]

That's a terrible yolk.

That's a bit of an eggsaggeration.

It's not my fault your yolk was an albumination.

[Orham]

Did you just use tabletop fantasy gaming terms to describe the great flood? I think I love you.

Oh, I did. And even better, I played by the limitations of each and every spell and item. I was genuinely curious if it was possible to replicate the Great Flood in a tabletop RPG using the rules given to me. Apparently it is, although seeing God running about changing shoes, flipping rings on and off His fingers, and Noah skulking about in the bushes to whack a Bengal tiger with a sleep rod in my head conjured up more laughter than I imagined it would.

I kept imagining Red Mage from 8-Bit Theater was narrating my description.