Wednesday, February 22, 2012

More Than Knee Deep

Trey Smith


Yesterday it rained a lot in South Bend. Nothing historic or out the ordinary for the winter season, but nearly 4.25" in one 24-hour period is more than the average. I was up at the local mini mart and, during a particularly heavy downpour, someone referenced the need to build an ark!

Two of us started discussing the insanity of the story of Noah's Ark. (For full disclosure, both of us are atheists.) While we certainly grant that this fabled story most likely is nothing more than an allegory, there are many fundamentalist Christians who believe that this tale, as told in the Book of Genesis, is a literal fact.

My friend Dan started debunking all of the crazy assertions of the story. The one part that sent both of us and the other folks who were listening into hysterics concerned what Noah did with all the animal excrement. We're talking about several hundred tons of dung and piss.

There is no way they could have that amount of animal waste in the ark. The fumes alone would have proven toxic, not to mention smelly. It also would have become a breeding ground for pathogens which would have jeopardized the health of all the animals and the humans too. Even the weight of the excrement is a major issue because carrying that amount of weight would have sunk the boat.

One way that some might try to extricate the story from these science-based objections is to suggest that Noah and his crew simply tossed the excrement overboard. However, as the site Rational Wiki calculates, this notion doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny either. Noah and his 7 family members would have needed to work a minimum of 17 hours per day JUST TO REMOVE THE WASTE SOLIDS, not including the liquid components.

That would have left a mere 7 hours per day to take care of everything else: feeding the animals, checking on them, eating, sleeping and whatever else that needed to be done.

There is one other possible explanation, but it's one I have never seen advanced: God instructed all the various creatures simply to "hold it in" until they were to be released. Can you imagine not going to the bathroom for weeks on end?

Neither can I!

2 comments:

  1. There is one other possible explanation, but it's one I have never seen advanced: God instructed all the various creatures simply to "hold it in" until they were to be released. Can you imagine not going to the bathroom for weeks on end?

    Fundamentalists will come up with any explanation to defend their belief in the literal interpretation of Bible stories. While I haven't heard about God miraculously stopping living beings from pooping*, Answers in Genesis tells us that it was possible for Noah to handle all of the animal's waste. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v2/n2/caring-for-the-animals
    Creation Ministries International also thinks this was possible. http://creation.com/how-did-all-the-animals-fit-on-noahs-ark

    *Though I did hear this joke once: A minister told his congregation that he could give a sermon based on one word at a moments notice, and one Sunday asked for submissions. He pulled a slip of paper from the box of suggestions, opened it, and read "constipation." He immediately launched into his sermon, "And Moses went up onto the mountain for forty days and forty nights."

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