Creation/Evolution Issue XI CONTENTS Winter 1983 SPECIAL ISSUE: THE IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE OF NOAH'S ARK by Robert A. Moore 1 Building the Ark 21 Surviving the Flood 5 Accommodating All Those Animals 25 Caring for the Cargo 9 Leaving Some Things Behind 33 Disembarking 13 Sizing Up the Load 35 Conclusion 17 Gathering the Cargo 39 Bibliography COVER ARr Bob Englehatt, !983. Hartford < ou,dn! Reprinted w,th f,e,mlss»n, Los Angles 'Irmcs IA'TOK,,., LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED About this issue . . . To many, it will seem bizarre that, in this age of scientific advancement and sophisticated biblical criticism, it would be necessary to provide a point-by-point scientific refutation of the story of Noah's ark. Knowledgeable people are well aware that Genesis 1 through 11 is not scientific or historical but largely mythical, metaphorical, poetic, theological, and moral. All people are not knowledgeable, however. Recent Gallup surveys reveal that 50 percent of adult Americans believe that Adam and Eve existed, 44 percent believe the earth was created directly by God only ten thousand years ago, and 40 percent believe that the Bible is inerrant. No doubt an equally high percentage believe in Noah's ark. This state of affairs has prompted some to advocate more public exposure to the higher criticism. But fundamentalists are generally opposed to the conclusions of the higher critics, and many other people don't seem interested in studying the Bible that closely. This means that another approach is often needed—one that deals directly with the "scientific creationist" arguments concerning the ark and the flood. Only after the creationist arguments have been scientifically answered will many people consider seriously the conclusions of modern biblical scholars. This is why Robert Moore, in this issue of Creation/Evolution, has accepted the task of providing a direct and definitive response to the creationist Noah's ark arguments. In performing this task, Moore has found it necessary to take cre- ationists at their word that the Bible must be read literally. He knows this position is untenable, and his article helps prove it. But proceeding in this way has allowed him to better focus on the creationists' scientific errors. Though Moore uses the Bible as a constant reference point, he actually does not engage in biblical criticism. His critique is rather directed at the leading creationist books and experimental studies that seek to scientifically prove that the ark story can be treated as secular history. He knows how deadly serious cre- ationists are about the historicity of the ark account. This seriousness is evidenced by the large expenditures creationists make on expeditions to Mt. Ararat, the meticulous and weighty tomes they write to answer every possible objection, and the efforts they take to encourage widespread public and private school use of books such as Streams of Civilization, their world history text that treats the ark story as an actual event. So Moore must take the creationists almost as seriously as they take them- selves. The result is detailed but, hopefully, entertaining and informative, with the excellent side benefits of providing fascinating information on shipbuilding, seafaring, zookeeping, zoology, botany, volcanism, and even refuse disposal. CREA T1ON/EVOLUTION XI (Volume 4, Number 1) Creation/Evolution is a nonprofit publication dedicated to promoting evolutionary sci- ence. It is published quarterly—in January, April, July, and October—with the following subscription rates: annual (four issues), $8.00; Canadian or Mexican addresses, $9.00; foreign air mail, $14.00. Individual issues, including back issues, are $2.50 each. Funds should be made payable in U.S. funds on U.S. bank. Please send subscription requests, let- ters, changes of address, requests for information on reprint rights, article proposals, and other inquiries to: CREATION/EVOLUTION P.O. Box 146, Amherst Branch Buffalo, NY 14226 Staff: Editor, Frederick Edwords; Associate Editor, Philip Osmon LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED The Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark Robert A. Moore Suppose you picked up the newspaper tomorrow morning and were startled to see headlines announcing the discovery of a large ship high on the snowy slopes of Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey, As you hurriedly scanned the article, you learned that a team from the institute for Creation Research had unearthed the vessel and their measurements and studies had determined that it perfectly matched the description of Noah's Ark given in the book of Genesis, Would this be proof at last—the "smoking gun" as it were—that the earliest chapters of the Bible were true and that the story they told of a six-day creation and a universal flood was a sober, scientific account? Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is no. Even this sensational find is not enough to validate a literal reading of Genesis. Our continuing skepticism is in the tradition of philosopher David Hume, who wrote that "the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena that I should rather believe the most extraor- dinary events to arise from their concurrence than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature," As we shall see, the story of the great flood and the voyage of the ark, as expounded by modern creationists, contains so many incredible "violations of the laws of nature" that it cannot possibly be accepted by any thinking person. Despite ingenious efforts to lend a degree of plausibility to the tale, nothing can be salvaged without the direct and constant intervention of the Jeity. Building the Ark Tie requirements of the story. To make this point clear, let's start at the begin- ning of the biblical narrative and follow the story step by step. From the moment the impending storm is announced (Genesis 6:7, 13, 17) and Jehovah sets forth the design and dimensions of the ark ( lenesis 6:14-16), problems start appearing. The ark is to be made out of gopher wood according to a plan that calls for the ark to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide, and thirty cubits tall (450x75x45 feet, according to most creationists. See Segraves, p. 11). It is to contain three floors, a large door in the side, and a one cubit square window at the top. The floors are to be divided into rooms, and all the walls, Inside and out, Robert Moore, a writer on religious subjects, has testified at hearings on church-state issues and is an experienced mountain climber (with no intention of joining any ark expedition). Ccpyright © 1983 by Robert A, Moore LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED CREATION/EVOLUTION XI — 2 are to be pitched with pitch. Since the purpose of the ark is to hold animals and plants, particularly two of "every living thing of all flesh ... to keep them alive with thee" (Genesis 6:19), it will have to be constructed accordingly. Most creationists simply breeze through this description of the size and requirements of the ark without a second glance ("It is hard to believe that intelli- gent people see a problem here"—LaHaye and Morris, The Ark on Ararat, p. 248), often with a passing comment about the architectural skill of ancient peoples as manifested in the Seven Wonders of the World. But Noah's boat- building accomplishments have not been fully appreciated by his fans. Ancient shipbuilding. In the first place, the analogy with the Seven Wonders does not hold. Only one, the Great Pyramid of Cheops, comes within two thousand years of Noah's day, and it is really the only one whose construction could con- ceivably approach the level of sophistication of the ark. But the Great Pyramid did not spring de novo from the desert sands; rather, it was the culmination of over a century of architectural evolution, beginning when the "experimenting genius," Imhotep, inspired by the ziggurats of Babylon, built the Step Pyramid around 2680 BC, passing through some intermediate step pyramids to the Bent Pyramid of Snofru, then the first true pyramid, and finally the masterpiece at Cheop (Stewart, pp. 35-39). On the other hand, in an era when hollowed-out logs and reed rafts were the extent of marine transport, a vessel so massive appeared that the likes of it would not be seen again until the mid-nineteenth century AD. Before he could even con- template such a project, Noah would have needed a thorough education in naval architecture and in fields that would not arise for thousands of years such as physics, calculus, mechanics, and structural analysis. There was no shipbuilding tradition behind him, no experienced craftspeople to offer advice. Where did he learn the framing procedure for such a Brobdingnagian structure? How could he anticipate the effects of roll, pitch, yaw, and slamming in a rough sea? How did he solve the differential equations for bending moment, torque, and shear stress? Ancient shipbuilding did achieve a considerable level of technological sophis- tication, so much so that marine archaeologists are divided over its history (Basch, p. 52). But this was for vessels that were dinghies compared to the ark, and this skill emerged slowly over many centuries: nearly a millennium passed while Egyptian boat lengths increase from 150 to 200 feet (Casson, p. 17). Despite this, the craft remained a prescientific art, acquired through long years of appren- ticeship and experience, and disasters at sea due to faulty design were so persistent that the impetus was strong for a more scientific approach (Rawson and Tupper, p. 2). Obviously, the astronomical leap in size, safety, and skill required by Noah is far too vast for any naturalistic explanation. Not only was the ark without pedigree, it was without descendants also. Creationists Kofahl and Segraves tell us that civilization quickly redeveloped after LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED CREATION/EVOLUTION XI — 3 the flood because the survivors carried over the prediluvian culture: Noah lived 350 years afterwards, Shem 502 {The Creation Explanation, p. 227). During this time, people were fanning out and "replenishing the earth," carrying with them reminiscences of she deluge that would someday excite American missionaries from Sumatra to Spitzbergen. Yet Noah's primary contribution to humanity, his incredible knowledge of naval engineering, vanished without a trace, and the sea- farers returned to their hollow logs and reed rafts. Like a passing mirage, the ark was here one day and gone the next, leaving not a ripple in the Song saga of ship- building. The needs of the animals. As if the rough construction of the ship weren't head- ache enough, the internal organization had to be honed to perfection. With space at a premium every cubit had to be utilized to the maximum; there was no room for oversized cages and wasted space. The various requirements of the myriads of animals had to he taken into account in the design of their quarters, especially considering the length of the voyage. The problems are legion: feeding and water- ing troughs need to be the correct height for easy access but not on the floor where they will get filthy; the cages for horned animals must have bars spaced properly to prevent their horns from getting stuck, while rhinos require round "bomas" for the same reason; a heavy leather body sling is "indispensable" for transporting giraffes: primates require tamper-proof locks on their doors; perches must be the correct diameter for each particular bird's foot (Hirst; Vincent). Even the flooring is important, for, if it is too hard, hooves may be injured, if too soft, they may grow too quickly and permanently damage ankles (Klos); rats will suffer decubitus (ulcers) with improper floors (Orlans), and ungulates must have a cleated surface or they will slip and fall (Fowler). These and countless other technical problems all had to be resolved before the first termite crawled aboard, but there were no wildlife management experts available for consultation. Even today the transport requirements of many species are not fully known, and it would be physically impossible to design a single carrier to meet them all. Appar- ently, when God first told Noah to build an ark, he supplied a complete set of blueprints and engineering details, constituting the most intricate and precise revelation ever vouchsafed to humankind. Problems for the builders. So Noah grabbed his tools and went to work. LaHaye and Morris tell us that Noah and his three sons could have built the entire thing by themselves in a mere eighty-one years (p. 248). This includes not merely framing up a hull but: building docks, scaffolds, workshops; fitting together the incredi- ble maze of cages and crates; gathering provisions for the coming voyage; har- vesting the timber and producing all ihe various types of lumber from bird cage bars to the huge keelson beams—not to mention wrestling the very heavy, clumsy planks for the ship into I heir exact location and fastening them. What's worse, by LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED CREATION/EVOLUTION XI — 4 the time the job was finished, the earlier phases would be rotting away—a diffi- culty often faced by builders of wooden ships, whose work took only four or five years (Thrower, p. 32). Faced with such criticism, the creationists quickly convert the humble, right- eous farmer into a wealthy capitalist who simply hired all the help he needed (Segraves, p. 86-87). It is estimated that the construction of the Great Pyramid required as many as 100,000 slaves; Noah could have probably gotten by with less (there were, after all, "giants in the earth in those days" according to Genesis 6:4), but what he lacked in numbers he sorely needed in experienced and highly skilled craftsmen. How did he learn when to fell a tree and how to dry it properly to prevent rot and splitting, when the larger beams might take several years to cure (cf. Dumas and Gille, p. 322)? Did the local reed-raft builder have equip- ment to steam heat a plank so it could be forced into the proper position? A ship- yard in nineteenth-century Maine would have been overwhelmed by the size and complexity of this job, yet Noah still supposedly found enough time to hold revivals and preach doomsday throughout the land (Segraves, pp. 87-90). God told the patriarch to coat the ark, both inside and out, all 229,500 square feet of it, with pitch, and, in fact, this was a common practice in ancient times. But when Noah hurried to the corner hardware store, the shelf was bare, for pitch is a naturally occurring hydrocarbon similar to petroleum (Rosenfeld, p. 126), and we know that oil, tar, and coal deposits were formed when organic matter was buried and subjected to extreme pressure during the flood (Whitcomb and Morris, pp. 277-278, 434-436), so none of it existed in the prediluvian world. Morris (1976, p. 182) tries to say that the word for "pitch" merely means "cover- ing," but not only do all other Bible dictionaries and commentaries translate it "pitch" or "bitumen," but creationist Nathan M. Meyer reveals that all the wood recovered by arkaeologists on Mt. Ararat is "saturated with pitch" (p. 85). Thus it seems that God accommodated Noah by creating an antediluvian tar pit just for the occasion, and we have another miracle. Finally, our farmer-turned-architect had to confront the gravest difficulty of all: in the words of A. M. Robb, there was an "upper limit, in the region of 300 feet, on the length of the wooden ship; beyond such a length the deformation due to the differing distributions of weight and buoyancy became excessive, with con- sequent difficulty in maintaining the hull watertight" (p. 355). Pollard and Robertson concur, emphasizing that "a wooden ship had great stresses as a struc- ture. The absolute limit of its length was 300 feet, and it was liable to 'hogging' and 'sagging' " (pp. 13-14). This is the major reason why the naval industry turned to iron and steel in the 1850s. The largest wooden ships ever built were the six-masted schooners, nine of which were launched between 1900 and 1909. These ships were so long that they required diagonal iron strapping for support; they "snaked," or visibly undulated, as they passed through the waves, they leaked so badly that they had to be pumped constantly, and they were only used on short LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED CREATION/EVOLUTION XI — 5 coastal hauls because they were unsafe in deep water. John J. Rockwell, the designer of the first of this class, confessed that "six masters were not practical. They were too long for wood construction" (Laing, pp. 393, 403-409). Yet the ark was over 100 feet longer than the longest six-master, the 329 foot U.S.S. Wyoming, and it had to endure the most severe conditions ever encountered while transporting the most critically important cargo ever hauled. Clearly, God had to imbue this amateurishly assembled gopherwood with some very special properties to fit it for the voyage. So it should be clear by now why "intelligent people" somehow see a "prob- lem" in the building of the ark. Accommodating All Those Animals The requirements of the story. With the huge freighter near completion, the time was drawing near when its colorful cargo would clamber aboard. We now turn to this subject to see if we can learn who and how many made the fateful trip. Genesis 6:19-20 declares that two of each kind of animal were to be collected and brought on board. This is repeated in Genesis 7:8-9, and it is explicitly stated that this applied to clean and unclean beasts as well as to birds. But Genesis 7:2-3 specifies that clean beasts and birds were to be taken by sevens. Whatever the numbers, it is clear that no animals could be left out. Genesis 7:4 states that "every living substance" that God made was to be destroyed "from off the face of the earth" by the impending flood. Genesis 7:23 repeats the point and adds that only those things with Noah in the ark could survive. Limiting the cargo to "kinds." Creationists realize that the ark had a limited amount of room and they are aware of the large number of species in the animal kingdom. Therefore, they have employed various tactics to reduce the population needed on board. Probably the most important tactic is to restrict the command to "kinds" rather than species and to argue that the former are much fewer in number than the latter. A kind (or "baramin" in creationist jargon) is the unit of life originally made by God. Within each kind is an enormous potential for variation, resulting, dur- ing the past six thousand years or so, in a large number of similar animals that scientists classify into species. Meyer contends that "He created into the repro- ductive apparatus of genes and chromosomes the possibility of endless hereditary combinations producing the possibility of endless variety within each 'kind' " (p. 37). By juggling the number of kinds, LaHaye and Morris reduce the total population aboard the ark to 50,000 (p. 247), Whitcomb and Morris reduce it to 35,000 (p. 69), while Dr. Arthur Jones squeezes it down to a bare bones total of 1,544 (quoted in Balsiger and Sellier, p. 130). LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED CREATION/EVOLUTION XI — 6 Genetic problems. Is this a valid argument? Without going into the details of genetics, it can be stated that every inherited trait, however small, is coded for by one or more genes, and each gene locus may have a substantial number of vari- ants (alleles), which accounts for the great variety observed in a given population. Any specific individual, however, has at most only two alleles per locus—one from each parent. As James C. King writes: There is good evidence for concluding that every message coded in the DNA exists in any sizeable population in numerous versions, forming a spectrum grading from grossly defective alleles—such as the one for albinism—at one end, through the slightly deviant, to the normal at the other end. And the normal is probably not a single version of the message but a collection of slightly different alleles. (p. 55) Hence, for a trait such as human pigmentation, "we can visualize not merely a few dozen interacting loci but an array of perhaps a dozen or so alleles at each locus" (p. 60). From this we can see that the original canine baramin in Eden would have needed a fantastic set of giant chromosomes with alleles for every trait that would someday be manifest in coyotes, wolves, foxes, jackals, dingos, fennecs, and the myriad of minute variations in hair color (twenty-four genes at nine loci), height, face shape, and so forth that are seen in the domestic dog (cf. Hutt). So, too, for the feline kind, within which creationists Byron Nelson (p. 157) and Alfred Reh- vvinkel (p. 70) both place lions, tigers, leopards, and ocelots as well as housecats. Similar giant chromosomes would be required for the bovine kind, equine kind, and so on. In the centuries before the deluge, these strange progenitors must have rapid- ly diversified into their potential species, as the fossil record shows. The equine kind developed not only zebras, horses, onagers, asses, and quaggas but Eohip- pus, Mesohippus, Merychippus, and other now-extinct species that paleontolo- gists have misinterpreted as evidence for evolution. (Remember that creationists hold that the flood is responsible for the burial of most, if not all, fossil species. Therefore they had to already exist prior to the deluge.) Then one day, many centuries later, the Lord told Noah to take two canines, two felines, two equines, two pinnipedians—one male and one female each—and put them aboard the ark. The trick is, which does our ancient zoologist choose? A male kit fox and a female Great Dane? A female lion and a male alley cat? An Eohippus and a Clydesdale? Which two individuals would possess the tremen- dous genetic complement that their ancestors in Eden had, to enable the many species to reappear after the flood? How could Noah tell? Creationist Dennis Wagner tells us that the original kinds degenerated through inbreeding so that their offspring would "never again reach the hereditary variability of the parent" (quoted in Awbrey; my emphasis). Yet the unique couple aboard the ark needed LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED CREATION/EVOLUTION XI — 7 the full genetic potential of the original kind, if not more, for a vast new array of climatic and geographic niches was opened up by the flood. Speaking of a hypothetical group of six or eight animals stranded on an island, King says, "Such a small number could not possibly reflect the actual allelic frequencies found in the large mainland population" (p. 107). What, then, of the single pair on the ark? These criticisms apply to the eight humans aboard the boat as well (Genesis 6:18 and 7:7). Creationists still cling to obsolete stereotypes concerning the "three distinct families of man" descended from Noah's three sons (Custance, p. 204) and even talk candidly of the Afro-Asian "Hamites" being "possessed of a racial character concerned mainly with mundane matters" and subject to displacement by "the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites" (Henry Morris, 1977, p. 130). In reality the ethnic complexity found throughout the world cannot be derived from the flood survivors in the few centuries since that time. The human genetic pool was reduced to five individuals—Mr. and Mrs. Noah and their daughters-in-law (the three sons don't count because they only carry combina- tions of the genes present in Mr. and Mrs. Noah, unless creationists are willing to admit to beneficial gene mutations). And even if, by some freak coincidence, the five people never had a variant in common, there would still be far too few alleles to account for humankind's diversity. Nearly a third of human genes are poly- morphic (Bodner and Cavalli-Sforzi, p. 589), and some, such as the two control- ling A and B antigens, with thirty varieties (p. 589), would require substantially more people than Genesis makes available. If creationists allowed beneficial mutations to produce the thirty different antigens of the A and B series in the HLA region, it would still not solve their problem. Individuals are only heterozygous at a fairly low percentage of loci (5 to 20 percent), while the population could be polymorphic at nearly half the loci. It's questionable how viable an individual would be with a high percentage of heterozygosity (Dobzhansky, Ayala, el a!., p. 72). Creationist Lane Lester recognizes the force of these facts, but he believes that supergenes, several genes acting in concert, would solve the problem (p. 251). This, however, only confuses the concept of supergenes, which control several characters in an organism, not one, and thus cannot produce the observed variety in a population from two parents (cf. Parkin, p. 141). How this horizontal evolu- tion would be realized is even more mystifying. Since each generation would receive a huge set of variants, including maladaptive recessives, a wholly random mix of oddball creatures should result, and the rapid, efficient adaptations neces- sary in the hostile post-flood climate would prove impossible. How could the arctic fox branch of the canine baramin be assured that only those alleles permit- ting tolerance to extreme cold would dominate? Why shouldn't freshwater fish hatch offspring manifesting the genes of their saltwater relatives? Furthermore, LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED CREATION/EVOLUTION X\ — 8 strangely shaped chromosomes and odd-numbered sets of them (necessary to contain the excess genes) usually disrupt meiotic cell division and produce sterile offsprong (White, pp. 172, 261). On the other hand, it seems puzzling that such diversification should occur at all, for the originally created kinds were "good" and their "devolution" would "reduce the ability of the animal to survive in nature" (Whitcomb, 1972, p. 80); since the baramins, after all, prospered and replenished in the bleak desolation of post-diluvian Armenia, they should feel comfortable in any environment today. The impetus for speciation is lacking in this model, and there is no reason why, say, a snow leopard should evolve when the superior, better-fit "feline-min" migrated into an alpine environment. We can only conclude with creationist Walter Lammerts that "intelligent design" was activating and controlling this en- tire process (p. 261). Taxonomic problems. The taxonomy of kinds is another bewildering subject. The only clear thrust of creationist writing seems to be ridiculing the concept of species, a term usually rendered with quotation marks. We respond with White that, "if we were to give up the notion of species altogether, most discussions in such fields as ecology, ethology, population genetics, and cytogenetics (to name only a few) would simply become impossible" (p. 5). Aside from this, the creationist baramin can vary anywhere from the level of genus to order (Siegler, 1978)—or even to phylum (Ward, p. 49)—although there seems to be a vague consensus approximating it with the biological family. The most often-cited instance of a kind, for example, is the family Canidae, which has fourteen genera and thirty-five species (Siegler, 1974). But Sciuridae (squirrels) has 281 species, and the genus Rattus (old world rats) has several hundred. Would creationists recognize the eighteen families of bats, with their eight-hundred-plus species, as eighteen distinct kinds, or would they make the order Chiroptera into a single bat kind? Would they distinguish the nearly thirty families (two thousand species) of catfish? At the other extreme are many families with but a single species, and even higher categories, such as the orders Tubulidentata (aardvarks) and Struthioniformes (ostriches) or even the phylum Placozoa, with but one rep- resentative. Why did the creator endow rats, bats, catfish, and mosquitos (twenty-five hundred species in family Culicidae) with such adaptive potential but withhold this potential from aardvarks, ostriches, and placozoans, especially when we learn that "each baramin was intended to move toward maximum varia- tion" (Ancil, p. 124)? What becomes of the science of taxonomy under this basis or when the "major categories" (phyla?) are sea monsters, other marine animals, birds, beasts of the earth, cattle, and crawling animals (Henry Morris, 1974, p. 216)? The theory of kinds is incoherent and confusing. Since it runs counter to all the known facts of genetics and taxonomy, the burden of proof is upon the ere- LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED