It Is Not Probable That the Genesis Flood Narrative Actually Occurred

I. Problems with the ArkThere are several problems with the concept of fitting two animals of each species onto the Biblical ark. These include problems with the size of the ark and the required contents, problems with the care of the animals on the ark, and the shape of the ark. I. i. Problems with the Size of the ArkIt is estimated that there are around 8.7 million eukaryotic species on Earth. However, this does not include prokaryotes, and it is estimated that this number is one-fifth the actual number (only that number have actually been found). It also discounts the fact that some species sexually reproduce, meaning that there'd need to be two animals of that species, one male and one female to allow for the repropogation of the species. I'll just stick with the very conservative estimate that there would have been 8.7 million animals on the ark. [1]Genesis 6:15 says, "And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. " A cubit is approximately 18 inches, meaning the ark would be 450 feet long, 75 feet long, and 45 feet high, making the ark have a volume of 1,518,750 cubic feet. This would allow each animal around 0.17 cubic feet of space, which is around the size of a normal book. [2]Clearly, even allowing for the microscopic size of many species, there are more than enough larger animals to cause spacing problems on the ark. The ark was clearly too small to hold all of the animals. To make the problem even worse, this also doesn't consider the space that would have been required to maintain the animals, which brings me to the next subpoint. I. ii. Problems with Maintaining the AnimalsAnimals require several things. Most basically, food, water, and the ability to dispose of their waste. The food requirements for 8.7 million animals would obviously be enormous. Problems with food include volume (making the space per animal even smaller), spoilage (meat, for example, required for carnivores like lions and bears, would not keep for a year, requiring the ark to have additional animals to kill to provide meat), and variety (especially for herbivores, each of which requires a specific plant diet, meaning that there'd need to be thousands of different types of plants on broad, some having to be able to last a year). There were obviously no problems with water requirements though. However, the ability of dispose of waste would also be a big problem. The big problem would be mechanism for removal (each "stall" would require a tube that the animal would have to be smart enough to know how to use, or Noah and his sons could physically remove all the waste, although that would be next to impossible), because if the waste were not adequately removed, sanitation and ventilation problems would abound, not to mention making the already very cramped situation even worse. I. iii Problems with the Shape of the ArkWhile the Bible does not explicitly say what shape the ark was, given Genesis 6:15 above, we can conclude that the ship was at least somewhat polygonic in shape, given that the length, width, and height of the ark could be measured. It could have looked like a modern ship, or it could have looked like a box. The best example we have of the shape of boats from the time period comes from the figurines of ancient Egypt. These ships were generally seaworthy, but they were also rather small. "The first dynasty boats found at Abydos were about 25 metres [around 80 feet] long, two to three metres wide and about sixty centimetres deep, seating 30 rowers. " Even today, the largest ships only reach 300 feet in length, and these ships require a lot of reinforcement. There is no kind of reinforcement mentioned in the Bible, and the problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the ark was made of wood, making it in even more need of reinforcement. In other words, there are two problems here - one, the ark is way too big for ships of the time, and two, even ships approaching that size require significant reinforcement, which was not mentioned in the Bible. [3]II. Problems with the FloodThere are several problems with the concept of a global flood. These include problems with the source of the flood, the dispersal of the flood, and the implications of the flood. II. i Problems with the Source of the Flood There must have been a tremendous amount of water on the Earth. Genesis 7:19 says, "And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. " The tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest, which is around 29,035 feet tall. Thus, the amount of water required to cover the Earth would roughly need to equal the volume of a spherical sheel with the radius of the Earth as the inner radius and the radius of the Earth plus 29,035 feet as the outer radius. Using the metric system, the radius of the Earth is approximately 6,378 kilometers and the height of Mount Everest is approximately 8.85 kilometers. The volume enclosed equals (4/3)*pi*(Ro-Ri)^3, where Ri is the inner radius and Ro is the outer radius. Plugging in the numbers, this would give an area of 4.53 billion cubic kilometers, which is three times the amount of water present on the Earth. [4]Because of this, my opponent is going to have to provide some fantastic explanation for the source of the flood. There is very little water below the surface of the Earth, and rain would have to come from existing sources of water on the Earth, meaning that any rain would not result in any net change in water on Earth. Any extraterrestrial source seems highly unlikely, considering that are not freely mobile large bodies of water floating throughout the solar system, specificially ones which would require the amount of water that the flood required. II. ii. Problems with the Dispersal of the FloodEven if my opponent manages to put forth a satisfactory explanation for the origin of all this extra water, he would still have to explain how the water would disperse. Evaporation is not an option, because this would simply put an enormous amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, which would be detectable even today, even given that it was possible. Going towards the center of the Earth is not an option either, because, below the surface, the Earth is very crowded and hot. Once again, my opponent is going to have to provide some fantastic explanation for the dispersal of the flood waters. II. iii. Implications of the FloodA flood, as large and devestating as the one documented in the Bible, would leave a plethora of presently noticeable effects. For one thing, Noah and his family were Israelites, a type of Semite. However, today, we see many different ethnicities. It is unlikely that all of the ethnicities currently present on Earth could have evolved from Noah and his family, of which there were only eight in total, in the span of the 4000 odd years since the flood, considering that they were Israelites. "Genealogies in Genesis put the Tower of Babel about 110 to 150 years after the Flood [Gen 10:25, 11:10-19]. How did the world population regrow so fast to make its construction (and the city around it) possible? Similarly, there would have been very few people around to build Stonehenge and the Pyramids, rebuild the Sumerian and Indus Valley civilizations, populate the Americas, etc. "[5]For another, there was the problem of inbreeding. While the two animals of each species were most likely not related, their offspring would have had to mate with each other. This would continue in noticeable form for several generations. Inbreeding causes serious problems for offspring. This is known as inbreeding depression. It is thought that this arises from ". .. the presence of recessive deleterious mutations in populations. " In other words, organisms have certain harmful recessive alleles. These will sometimes be passed to offspring, but it's rare because the genes are recessive. However, the chances are significantly increased when two closely related organisms mate that both have the recessive allele, which means that that allele is passed on to its offspring. However, all of the species somehow made it out alright at the end. This is more than a bit too coincidental. [6]Moving to geological considerations, there is no record of the flood in the ice cores, even though an event of this magnitude would obviously have to be present in them. "Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. A worldwide flood would be expected to leave a layer of sediments, noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, and probably other evidence. "[5]ConclusionThere are too many problems with the Genesis flood narrative to take it seriously. The ark was way too small to fit everything that was needed on it, maintaining the animals would have been a Herculean task and certainly not fit for just eight people to do, the shape and structure of the ark could not have supported a ship of that size, there need to be fantastic explanations for the source and dispersal of the flood, and there are many necessary implications of the flood that are not present, including human diversity, non-interbred animal populations, and ice core records. Overall, any story must be allegorical, for any literal story does not stand up to scrutiny. Sources[1]: . http://www.nature.com...[2]: . https://www.biblegateway.com...;(KJV version)[3]: . http://www.reshafim.org.il...[4]: . http://water.usgs.gov...[5]: . http://www.talkorigins.org...[6]: . http://www.nature.com...