This is the first in a series of examinations of the problems with (a literal interpretation of) Genesis. Originally posted to Rachel's Hobbit Hole.
So
I'm starting big: Noah's ark & the flood. This post will address
some of the implications of Noah's ark, the flood, and dinosaurs.
First, a little background.
Genesis 7 tells us that Noah loaded multiples of every animal on the ark:
2
Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and
his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his
female.
3 Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.
Now, with there being,
at a low estimate,
some 8.7 million or so species known today, a literal reading -- that
Noah crammed every species into the ark -- is patently absurd. Even
young earth creationists see the folly of such literal reading. So
YEC have pared it down to "kinds":
The concept of kind is important for understanding how Noah fit all the
animals on the ark. If kind is at the level of family/order, there would
have been plenty of room on the ark to take two of every kind and seven
of some. For example, even though many different dinosaurs have been
identified, creation scientists think there are only about 50 “kinds” of
dinosaurs. Even though breeding studies are impossible with dinosaurs,
by studying fossils one can ascertain that there was likely one
Ceratopsian kind with variation in that kind and so on. (emphasis added)
(Yes, you read that right. No, it's
not an anomaly either.
Young earth creationists posit that, aside from "regular" animals, Noah
had dinosaurs on the ark. Yes, dinosaurs. Now please pick your jaw up
from the floor and carry on reading.)
YECs believe this settles the difficulty of loading the ark. While I will grant that the numbers they toss around -- "
16,000 animals (the maximum number of animals on the Ark, if the most liberal
approach to counting animals is applied)" -- are
less absurd than 8.7
million
times some figure between two and seven, it is a far stretch from
reasonable or supportable. It is also something that is completely
invented: the Bible makes no mention of supersets, or speciation
occurring after the flood. If we're reading Genesis literally, there is
absolutely no reason (beyond "gosh, claiming that makes us look really
stupid...") to inject animal families, speciation, etc., into the text.
Creationism in this regard is not a literal reading of the flood story;
creationists have added to the story that which was never mentioned, and
changed the meaning of "every" to become something else entirely,
something that seems, in context, less absurd than "every" animal.
At any rate, while there seems to be a little divergence among young earth creationists over whether the ark was
comfortable or
not, the consensus is that it was all very doable. The logistical difficulties are mitigated in several ways.
First, we must know that, "Without getting into all the math, the 16,000-plus animals would have
occupied much less than half the space in the Ark (even allowing them
some moving-around space)." In case you're wondering, yes, that includes dinosaurs, because
In Genesis 6:19–20,
the Bible says that two of every sort of land vertebrate (seven of the
“clean” animals) were brought by God to the Ark. Therefore, dinosaurs
(land vertebrates) were represented on the Ark.
And
YECs have anticipated the "how the heck did dinosaurs fit on the ark?!"
objection. AiG tells that "not all dinosaurs were huge like the
brachiosaurus, and even those dinosaurs on the Ark were probably 'teenagers' or young adults."
(I
can't help but wonder how large a "teenage" brachiosaurus would have
been, and how kindly its parents would have taken to a few humans
herding it into a wooden prison.) As for food, God had that
difficulty all sorted out, too.
Dinosaurs could have eaten basically the same foods as the other
animals. The large sauropods could have eaten compressed hay, other
dried plant material, seeds and grains, and the like. Carnivorous
dinosaurs—if any were meat-eaters before the Flood—could have eaten
dried meat, reconstituted dried meat, or slaughtered animals. Giant
tortoises would have been ideal to use as food in this regard. They were
large and needed little food to be maintained themselves. There are
also exotic sources of meat, such as fish that wrap themselves in dry
cocoons.
While
there is zero evidence that Noah and his family would have had the
technology or know-how to prepare food in such a manner for 16,00
animals (not even the Bible mentions reconstituted meat and fish in
cocoons), the fact that something "would have been ideal" is often
presented in these creationist articles as if that is explanation
enough. Quite frankly, it's not. It would be "ideal" if leprechauns gave
the animals magic biscuits that nourished them to the fullest and
produced no waste materials, but "ideal" isn't "evidence that it
happened". And evidence, of course, is never forthcoming.
There's
also the issue of food storage: where, exactly, does one store enough
food for 16,000 animals on a ship? An African elephant
can eat 300 lbs of food
per day. In a year, that's 109,500 pounds of food,
per elephant. A
lion eats 8-9 kg of food a day;
that's between 6437.5 to 7242 pounds per lion. That means that Noah
& co would have had to pack 16 to 18 times the weight of a large
female, or 11.7 to 13 times the weight of a large male lion,
per lion.
African elephants range between 5,000 and 14,000 lbs; Noah's family
would have had to have room for 8 times the weight of a huge elephant.
On the other end of the scale, a grasshopper eats about 1/2 their own
weight in a day -- meaning that even taking something as tiny as a
grasshopper isn't as simple as it sounds: for every grasshopper you
take, you need to take about 182.5 times its weight in food. Since
grasshoppers are, Biblically speaking, clean animals, that's 1277.5 (or
2555, if the seven of the clean creatures is interpreted to mean seven
of both male and female) times the weight of a grasshopper in food. You
can quickly see how this will spiral out of control: it's not just a
matter of cramming the sorry creatures into the ark, it's a matter of
feeding them thereafter. Since they're all going to eat more than their
own weight, generally many times more, Noah would have had to
accommodate that (there goes the opportunity for perambulation, and then
some...)
So, let's recap the "literal" reading of the
flood story. Noah and his family built a giant, three-level boat, and
loaded at least two of all animals (some restrictions and limitations
apply; please see Kent Hovind or Ken Ham's interpretation of "literal"
for details) thereon, including dinosaurs. Baby or teenage dinosaurs.
This was a roomy, or not, ride, depending on who you ask. Noah stashed
what can only have been a considerable amount of dried hay, giant
turtles and reconstituted dried meat in the ark, for his companions'
feeding. And let's leave waste management for another post, because,
really, this literal interpretation stuff provides more than enough sh*t
for one day...
So now we come to the question of "what
happened afterwards?" Well, as for the dinosaurs (we'll save the others
for another post), God's plan to save them didn't work out so well.
First of all,
there was climate change (no, not the kind that we can measure and demonstrate, silly! The kind that Kent Hovind extrapolates from Genesis):
Dinosaurs getting off the ark had a very difficult time. The climate had
changed and things were different. Remember before the Flood they lived
to be 900. After the Flood they only lived to be 400, then 200, and
then 100. Now in today’s world 100 is old.
There were other factors, of course.
As the population of people began to grow after the Flood, the
population of dragons began to go down. As people moved in and civilized
an area, the big ferocious animals are either killed off or driven off.
It happens everywhere. That is exactly what happened to dragons. People
killed dragons for several reasons. They killed them for meat, because
they were a menace, to be a hero, to prove their superiority,
competition for land and medicinal purposes. Many ancient recipes
included dragon blood, dragon bones and dragon saliva. Gilgamesh is
famous for slaying a dragon.
(In YEC-ese, dragon is
the old fashioned name for dinosaur). When it comes to evidence, the
standard seems to be "can it be construed as supporting the creationist
narrative?" If yes, then it's fact; if no, then myth. Thus we can accept
dragons, but not
sirens,
nymphs, unicorns (those even get a mention, in the KJV!), griffins,
Jotunn, dwarves, vampires, zombies, etc., etc., etc. And while “dragons”
are useful to the creationist narrative, and the rest
aren't, we have no more evidence of dragons than most of the
others (and in some cases, less...consider all the actual burials of
"vampires", for instance; surely, a burial has to trump a story,
right?).
But the real kicker is that extinction
is the "wrong" way to look at it altogether. As Hovind asks, "The
question is not what made them go extinct, the question is: did they go
extinct?" He seems to believe that they, or some of them at least, are
not, in fact, extinct at all.
During the Age of Sailing Ships there were thousands of legends of
people sighting sea monsters. Well, if you are in a sail boat it’s
pretty quiet going through the water. Today, with a diesel engine they
can probably hear you coming 50 miles away under water. Of course, you
are not going to see one today. But, there are stories all over about
dragons living with man.
In Hovind's worldview,
dinosaurs are still out and about, hiding beneath the waves. They were
happy to come out and be spotted by superstitious people (who also
reported spotting mermaids and a host of other myths), but have a fear
of technologically advanced folk (who might actually document and prove
their existence)...even those in wind-powered sailing craft. They are
also the dragons of Chinese and Babylonian myth and the dragons
mentioned in the KJV. Ken Ham is slightly less committal, but
he leaves the door open all the same.
Evolutionary indoctrination that man did not live at the same time as
dinosaurs stops most scientists from even considering that the drawings
are of dinosaurs.
It certainly would be no embarrassment to a creationist if someone
discovered a dinosaur living in a jungle. However, this should embarrass
evolutionists.
To be fair, he is probably right on one point -- it's a stretch to suppose that
anything could embarrass the folks who run Answers in Genesis. But I digress.
So,
as far as dinosaurs are concerned, God saved the babies in order to let
them die out thereafter because of climate change and man's activities.
Or most of them. Or some of them. Who knows. Regardless, it was all
part of God's amazing plan. Amen.
Moving on...let's just look at how the 50 dinosaur
kinds became the wide diversity of dinosaurs that we know existed (at least
300 species). This happened through a
variety of means, including (wait for it...) natural selection.
After the Flood, the animals were told to “be fruitful and multiply on the earth
” (Genesis 8:17).
As they did this, natural selection, mutation, and other mechanisms
allowed speciation within the kinds to occur. Speciation was necessary
for the animals to survive in a very different post-Flood world.
There's
a couple of problems with this. First, if the varied species of
dinosaurs came to be only after the 100 ark-traveling-baby-dinosaurs
disembarked, the argument that
mass graveyards point to the flood is null and void. How can species that did not yet exist have died in the flood?
The contorted shapes of these animals preserved in the rocks, the
massive numbers of them in fossil graveyards, their wide distribution,
and some whole skeletons, all provide convincing evidence that they were
buried rapidly, testifying to massive flooding.
Furthermore,
how can hundreds of new species have been born in a time that was, as
creationists seem to universally agree upon, very unkind to dinosaurs?
If dinosaurs were experiencing shortened lives, climate change, habitat
challenge, and all manner of threats from humanity, is it likely that
such a wide range of species as we know existed would have come into
being? Is it logical to suppose that an increasingly hostile environment
gave rise to many times the diversity of species than were witnessed
before the flood?
In
the creationist narrative, when the dinosaurs left the ark, they
were suddenly thrown into a “devastated” and “much more
difficult world in which to survive.” But in these adverse
conditions, they promptly evolved into hundreds of species, leaving
the wealth of fossil evidence that we have behind...and also died out
(or
mostly died out), because of said harsh conditions. Those are really
pretty mutually exclusive states. You can either have them emerging
into a world that fosters a gigantic boom in dinosaur life, or you
can have them emerging into a world where climate change and hunters
will drive them to extinction. Remember, creationism limits the time of
existence after the flood to a tiny window, a mere 4,000 years. The
argument is that,
simultaneously, dinosaur life exploded, all over the globe; and was
driven out of existence, to such a point that the best “evidence”
we have for dinosaurs co-existing with man is the occasional dragon
legend
(and, again, we're being very picky-and-choosy about what kind of
legends we're going to accept as factual, and what we're going to
dismiss as hogwash). And all of this happened in the course of 4,000
years. It's a preposterous stretch with other species (necessitating, as
Bill Nye pointed out during his debate with Ken Ham, an average of 11
new species evolving per day), but what happens when we throw in
the condition that they must evolve and die in enough time to ensure
that our only evidence is spotty legend, here and there, of dragon
fights and sightings? You have hundreds of species of dinosaur evolving
at a rapid pace, into a hostile environment, and then mostly dying out
-- far enough in the past that our sightings are, as noted, irregular,
ill documented and, oddly, often connected to tales of fantasy and
magic. (That's a coincidence).
But it gets better,
as you dig deeper. See, creationists aren't claiming that it was just a
matter of more hunters (there would be less, presumably, for some time
after the flood -- Noah's incestuous family, no matter how quickly they
got to, umm, work, would have had some difficulty repopulating the world
that quickly). They're not saying it was just lifespan changes and whatnot. Creationists allege that the
ice age was
a direct result of the flood:
The Flood-Caused Ice Age
Two particular aspects of the Flood were instrumental in causing the
Ice Age: (1) extensive volcanic activity during and after the Flood, and
(2) the warm oceans following the Flood.
And though the Bible doesn't mention the ice age at all, and even though things in the past more or less didn't happen
if you weren't an eyewitness or the Bible doesn't mention them, creationists can be very specific about how long the ice age lasted:
Thus, the total time for the Ice Age is a maximum of only about 700 years (500 years to accumulate, 200 years to melt).
Most believe the Ice Age was triggered by the Flood of Noah. The
rising magmas, lavas, and hot waters associated with continental plate
movements would have caused ocean temperatures to rise. Also, fine ash
from volcanic eruptions probably lingered in the upper atmosphere in
post-Flood years, which, unlike a greenhouse effect, would reduce the
sunlight for cooler summers. So the mechanism for such a rare event was
in place due to Genesis 6–8.
But what happens in an ice age? A lot of water is taken out of the
ocean and deposited on land, so the ocean level drops. This exposes land
bridges.
Animals,
including dinosaurs, made their way all over the world, aided at least
in part by these ice-age-exposed land bridges. Now take a moment to
consider the implications of this. The hundreds of species
for which we find evidence all over the globe are somehow supposed to
have crossed various land bridges during the ice age (the land bridges
would be flooded afterward). So,
the dinosaurs presumably evolved into all the species we know of AND
migrated all over the earth in the 500-700 years following the flood –
both of which factors are necessary in this scenario, since we have
examples of many species
across many continents: they had to come into being, and had to
travel all over the world, before the ice age ended (and the
creationist land bridges were closed), since those species did not exist
on the ark. In other words, for the
populations we find all over the earth to have got there, they would
have had to be around before the 700 year ice age (which was itself
brought about by the flood) ended, closing the land bridges. So,
speciation would have had to occur very, very quickly, during an ice
age. That's right, during an ice age. And after speciation and
migration occurred, after at least part of the ice age,
dinosaurs would have faced extinction.
Even when addressing the creationist ice age's alleged impact on the dinosaurs, creationists seem to miss the point:
The Ice Age may also have contributed something else to animal
migrations. Generally speaking, reptiles are found in larger numbers and
greater varieties in warmer climates, potentially like most dinosaurs,
and would not thrive as well in the cold. It makes sense that they
strayed from colder areas, died out, or their numbers were at least
reduced. It also makes sense that mammals would thrive in colder
climates.
Let's recap.
1. 50 "kinds" of baby dinosaurs board the ark.
2. 50 kinds disembark.
3. The flood causes an ice age, which reaches its worst at 500 years.
4. The baby dinosaurs have grown up, and start creating baby dinosaurs of their own.
5. Hundreds of new species arise.
6. Thanks to the ice age (!!), the hundreds of new species of dinosaurs are able to get all over the world.
7.
Oh my god, there's an ice age going on!! Geez, why didn't anyone tell
us? (Many of the dinosaurs go extinct, because dinosaurs and ice ages
aren't a good mix...unless they're in the process of speciation and
migration, apparently, because that went off without a hitch)
8. The ice age ends. There are still dinosaurs alive, because they spawn dragon myths later on.
Granted,
I wasn't there and didn't see it, so I'm sure creationists (who also
weren't there and didn't see it, and whose book never mentions it) will
tweak my timeline a little. Some pieces necessarily cannot be tweaked,
however. 5 must proceed 6, and 3 has to be well underway before 6,
because that speciation
and migration would have had to occur before extinction in order for us
to find the
fossils that we find where we find them. (Say that five times fast...)
When
one examines the creationist narrative, even just as it relates to
dinosaurs, the conclusion is inevitable: it is impossible and
contradictory. There
are many ways to interpret the Genesis stories, but to take parts of
them at face value and add your own interpretation elsewhere, as
creationists have done, is to make them absurd, and then to heap
further absurdities upon them. It is to construct a timeline of
events, particularly in regard to dinosaurs, that defies all reason
or logic. It is to selectively credit myths for which we have no
evidence as fact, with no good reason as to why one is accepted and
another discarded, beyond wishful thinking. It is to assert that
science,
which has good solid, evidence behind it, is wrong, on just about
everything, and to offer in its stead a few men's interpretation of
“a book”, as Ken Ham put it. It's not science, and I'm not
convinced that it's even very good religion. It's definitely a
disservice to both, because it disregards the one and makes the other
absurd.