Forums → WEPR → [nec]Christianity vs Atheism

Link 3, Post flood animal survival

A major problem with the global flood myth, as told in the Bible, being a real event is that the flood would have destroyed all available food. Hence, discounting the intellectually lazy cop-out of Goddidit, the entire menagerie Noah assembled would have died of starvation shortly after they disembarked the ark. There are a few "solutions" to this problem posed by creation scientists, but few of these solutions are even remotely realistic.

Herbivores

The herbivores among the animals would have no plants to eat, except the olive leaf brought back by the dove and the olive tree itself. Every plant would have died during the 376 day flood. There is no way the animals could have remained alive long enough for the plants to grow back.
The standard creationist answer to this situation is that the herbivores ate seaweed. This claim, while looking good on the surface, carries no weight. Seaweed grows only in depths of up to 70 metes (even then, in crystal clear water) because water absorbs a massive amount of sunlight, reducing the energy that it can impart to photosynthetic organisms - in fact, this is why some seaweeds are colours other than green, to maximise absorption of light that does get through that much water. Since the water covered all the mountains in the entire earth only the top 70 meters of the world's highest mountain, Mount Everest (K2 is 237 metres lower than Everest) would have had the sunlight required to support seaweed. Even on the top of the mountain you wouldn't find much seaweed because there is no good growing soil, another key factor for plant growth of any kind. This would leave us with only a tiny amount of seaweed nowhere near enough to support the thousands of herbivores on the Ark. Furthermore, no large crops of seaweed (i.e. kelp forests, etc.) would have grown in just over a year. Finally, all the seaweed would have rapidly rotted away when exposed to the air, long before more plants had an opportunity to grow, assuming Noah had the forethought to collect and store seeds from the Earth's vast variety of plant life, and ignoring the fact that saltwater-saturated soil is very bad for growing most land plants.

Carnivores

The carnivores would have been in an even worse position. There would be nothing left for them to prey on except the animals Noah had saved. This would have caused mass extinction. Remember, of the majority of creatures ("unclean animals&quot, only two animals of each "kind" were taken on the ark, so if the carnivores had eaten even a single one a species would go extinct. The excess clean animals could have provided at best one or two meals for thousands of predators, since Answers in Genesis asserts that; "the vast majority of animals are not clean." The carnivores would in actuality have eaten all the herbivores then gone extinct themselves.


A rather old hen corpse. It looks.... very nutritious....
John Woodmorappe, in Noah's Ark:A Feasibility Study, claims that the carnivores could have eaten the corpses of pre-flood animals. This is completely impossible, since medium size corpses can fully decay under optimal conditions in 50 days, while corpses underwater will decay about twice as slowly, so the vast majority of the corpses would have been completely decomposed by the termination of the Ark's voyage. The picture on the right shows what happens to a chicken's corpse after just a few weeks. In any event, the carnivores would have been unable to get at any corpses because they would have been buried under sediment.
If you accept the absurd creationist concept of baraminology, that means that there was one pair of "great cat kind" and seven pairs of the animals they feed on, "horse kind." Great cats eat at least one "horse kind" every two weeks so that would mean that horse kind would have been completely extincted after 3 and a half months. Even if the "horse kind" had immediately reproduced that would still be at most 28 "horse kind" which would have only provided six months of sustenance for "cat kind."

Thank you Black - I didn't think of doing that.

But it's a feasible volume.

They weren't humans, for crying out loud.
As for the facepalm, that's totally mature and relevant. How about this: maybe you can break away from the traditions of your fellow atheists and have an intelligent debate rather than try to make fun of us? Oh wait, maybe because you have no intelligent reply.

Correction: Pangaea existed 6,000 years ago.

Sorry for triple post (now quadruple post xD)
It just seems easier on the eye to read in separate posts, lol.

Thank you Black - I didn't think of doing that.

Have you guys ever heard of the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand? He took a little boys lunch, multiplied it by several thousand, and still had some left over.

Oh wait, maybe because you have no intelligent reply.

...what are you talking about? Let me simplify it for you:
Water in the sky.
God makes water fall from sky.
Water floods earth.
Folk die.

Like right now. Kody please read The Origins of Species and please research all of Charles Darwin's work.

May I add: Darwin himself said that he knew that his theory could be tossed, according to the 'missing links'. He said there should be millions upon millions of them, and yet we haven't found one. He also said that

May I add: Darwin himself said that he knew that his theory could be tossed, according to the 'missing links'. He said there should be millions upon millions of them, and yet we haven't found one. He also said that

Is it just me, or does everyone come on when I leave, then leave when I come on?

Have you ever heard of carbon 14? They usually are gone within around 40,000 years.

There are other forms of dating, most come from radiation, and all put the universe/earth at far longer than the young earth creationist view...

But I missed the "diamond story" so...

But I missed the "diamond story" so...

Religion matters, to the extent that they teach fundamental
paradigms and beliefs that affect peoples behavior...

Also, I'd have to say that although most religons can't
be proven (because they're false), there still are some
that can... and I recommend that nobody accept a
religion unless they see some real proof, in the form
of a direct personal experience with it's deity.

That would put the fakes out of business pretty quick,
but unfortunately a lot of people just base their belief
on the word of priests, or something written in an old
book...

Also, I'd have to say that although most religons can't
be proven (because they're false)

there still are some
that can

Yet they still can't be proven false; when debating religions it isn't possible to debate the validity of a religion based solely on whether or not it can be objectively proven.

there still are some
that can