Noah's Arse

We all know the story of Noah's ark, when God singled out Noah for the job of saving all life on Earth. Hard to imagine a more daunting task, but nonetheless Noah got the job done without a hitch. Well, this is one of two events in Noah's life that God deemed worthy of being recorded in the history book of the universe for all future generations to contemplate. The second event was, to be frank, regrettable, and one has to wonder why God decided to embarrass Noah by including it. Here's what happened:

Some time after the Flood, Noah was enjoying a well-earned glass of wine that he'd fermented from his own personal vinyard. It's not certain just how much he drank, but it must have been a hot evening because he ended up falling asleep in his tent stark bollock naked. Unfortunately, one of his three sons, Ham, discovered his dad in this state and went and informed his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who came back with a blanket and covered Noah while he slept. The next morning, presumably a little hungover, Noah saw the blanket and put two and two together. Feeling embarassed and probably more than a little grumpy, he called on God to... curse and enslave Ham's son, Canaan, who wasn't even involved. Ham's opinion of this harsh punishment isn't known.

So it would be great if any Christians who read this post could suggest why Noah acted like this, or even why this event was deemed worthy of entry in The Holy Bible. And if you think I'm just making this all up, go read Genesis 9:18-27.

Bathtub Arks Make the Story of Noah Seem Silly

PhD-loving creationist Jonathan Sarfati hates "bathtub" arks:

I would recommend discarding most modern children’s ‘Bibles’, geared more toward entertainment than education, that present sanitized Bible stories. These caricatures of history reduce Noah’s Ark and the Deluge, for example, from a chronicle of sin, punishment, and redemption to a tale more in line with Ol’ MacDonald’s Farm, complete with ‘bathtub ark’ illustrations showing protruding giraffe necks and lacking dinosaurs. Consequently, when the children become adults, they erroneously believe that the Bible is disconnected from the real world.

Noah's ark without dinosaurs? How preposterous! Ken Ham agrees:

When children see the ‘bathtub ark’—what is it really saying to them? I suggest that, in a sense, it is reinforcing what the world is claiming: that Noah’s Ark was just a ‘story’ or ‘fairy tale,’ and that Noah couldn’t have accommodated all the animals on board—and certainly this kind of ark would not have survived a Flood. In the past, this issue may not have mattered as much, but in our present world, where the majority don’t want to believe they are sinners, under the judgment of a Holy God, they thus scoff at the event of Noah’s Flood.

They're right of course. Bible history shouldn't be dumbed down for children. We need more books like this one:

Creationist Logic (or lack thereof)

I was browsing Creation Moments for something quick to post, and it didn't take me long to find this gem. It's from an article discussing whether Noah's flood was local or global:

After the Flood, God made a covenant promise with Noah and all mankind that the waters would never again become a flood to destroy all flesh (Gen. 9:11-15). There have been many local floods since, so either God has broken His covenant promise or the Genesis Flood was global.

This lazy, sloppy logic reminds me of CS Lewis's pathetic "trilemma" argument, in which Lewis states that since Jesus claimed to be God, he must either be "Lord, liar or lunatic", then sets out to disprove the latter two options (and fails). Lewis's brand of apologetics is famous for featuring false choices presented as logical arguments, and is easily refuted.

Trust me, I have a PhD...

This slide is taken from a presentation entitled "Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study". The whole slideshow can be seen here.


I love that someone has spent valuable time calculating the amount of shit the animals on Noah's ark would have produced.

Think back to when you were a kid and heard the ark story for the first time. Did you really ever believe it could be true? Really?? Well, apparently many people do, and many of them have PhDs. Needless to say, you shouldn't trust what people say just because they have a qualification. I did a google search for one of these scientists (Dr John R Baumgardner, who obtained a PhD in geophysics and space physics from UCLA) and found a creationist essay he'd written that demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of evolutionary theory:

Many evolutionists are persuaded that the 15 billion years they assume for the age of the cosmos is an abundance of time for random interactions of atoms and molecules to generate life. A simple arithmetic lesson reveals this to be no more than an irrational fantasy.

This arithmetic lesson is similar to calculating the odds of winning the lottery. The number of possible lottery combinations corresponds to the total number of protein structures (of an appropriate size range) that are possible to assemble from standard building blocks. The winning tickets correspond to the tiny sets of such proteins with the correct special properties from which a living organism, say a simple bacterium, can be successfully built. The maximum number of lottery tickets a person can buy corresponds to the maximum number of protein molecules that could have ever existed in the history of the cosmos.

For starters, the lottery analogy is an unwise choice, since someone somewhere wins the lottery every day.

For a relatively short protein consisting of a chain of 200 amino acids, the number of random trials needed for a reasonable likelihood of hitting a useful sequence is then in the order of 20^100 (100 amino acid sites with 20 possible candidates at each site), or about 10^130 trials. This is a hundred billion billion times the upper bound we computed for the total number of molecules ever to exist in the history of the cosmos!! No random process could ever hope to find even one such protein structure, much less the full set of roughly 1,000 needed in the simplest forms of life.

But evolution is not a random process! Here's a more accurate analogy: Imagine you are the only person playing the lottery, and the winning numbers are the same each week. The chances of you picking the right numbers at random are indeed vanishingly small. The chances of you picking one or two winning numbers, though, would be reasonably likely, at least over the course of a few weeks. But now imagine if there was a mechanism that told you when you'd picked a winning number, and what that number was. It's easy to see how you could use this information to choose your next set of numbers, and each week you'd be more and more likely to find the winning combination. Evolution works like this. It is not a random process, it explains how complexity can arise incrementally, in tiny stages, without the need for any luck.

The moral of this story is that you shouldn't trust someone just because they have a qualification. Dr Baumgardner studied geophysics and space physics, and his expertise is likely limited to a very specific area within that field. He is (clearly) not an expert in microbiology, chemistry or evolution. So if you ever want a reliable account of a theory, make sure you ask the experts.