"Juha Nieminen" wrote in message
Reply at the end...
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It is taking Ken Ham over 73 million dollars to build a completely
unseaworthy ark "replica" using modern technology, modern materials,
and a crew of probably hundreds of people. This "replica" would
probably not float even for a minute, much less be safe on the ocean.
You believe that one man and his three sons (or whatever the number
was) was able to build a wooden boat that's vastly bigger than any
other boat made of wood that has ever been built in the history of
humanity, with bronze-age technology and a crew of about four people,
and have it seaworthy? (Sure, bigger boats have been built in modern
times. They were not built of wood. There's a maximum size that you
can build from wood before it crumbles under its own weight.)
Even if it were to build a boat of that size from wood alone (it's
not, but let's assume it is), it's logistically impossible to do with
such a small crew with bronze-age technology.
Building a boat of that size with such a small crew and such primitive
technology would have taken decades, if not hundreds of years. "That's
fine", you say, "Noah was hundreds of years old." Yeah, sure, let's
accept that myth. However, that's not the problem. The problem is that
a wooden structure of that size would require constant maintenance,
especially given that it's constantly exposed to the elements. At some
point, when the structure reaches a certain size, the amount of
maintenance will take all the effort of the four-man crew, stopping
them from actually building any more of it.
Even if the boat wouldn't crumble under its own weight, it just cannot
be seaworthy. There's a lot of engineering that goes into building big
modern vessels, such as oil tankers. The sea exerts all kinds of stress
onto the ship and it has to be designed to withstand them.
Even if it had been just a *building* made of wood, rather than a boat,
it would have been completely unprecedent for the time. The technology
just wasn't there and, once again, there's a limit of how big a wooden
structure can be.
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For me, to believe that there is some degree of truth in the story of
Noah's Ark means accepting that there was considerable divine
intervention at every step of the way. Personally I have no problem
with that and don't try to "prove" the story based on science alone and
nor do I feel I need to.
If there wasn't a divine force or supernatural powers then not much of
the Bible makes sense anyway. I believe Jesus was God and rose from the
dead. Nothing scientific in that. Not a problem for me.
That's consistent, I suppose.
However, I think it makes more sense to divide the Bible stories into
three fairly obvious categories.
One is the divine or supernatural parts - such as Jesus rising from the
dead. That sort of thing is clearly a matter of belief and not
scientific, but still has to be accepted as basically factual if you are
a believer at all.
Another group is the historical stuff - things like the records of the
kings of Israel, or the letters to the early Christian church. These
are probably at least partly based on real lives and events, though
highly biased (as many histories are) and almost entirely without
third-party corroboration. Much of these parts are not particularly
relevant anyway.
Finally, there are the myths, allegories, legends, fairy tales, and
parables. This includes the creation myths, Noah's arch, and much of
the books of Moses. If you treat these the way most religions treat
their myths (including the way almost all Christians treated them until
a couple of centuries ago), they are stories to describe God, his
relationship to people, his strengths, his weaknesses, and how he wants
people to behave. It is pointless to try to view these things as "real"
events - it involves so much waving of magic wands and divine
intervention that it becomes meaningless as "real" events, and you lose
all purpose and teaching from the story. When Jesus told the parable of
the lost sheep, he did not mean it literally - the same applies to the
old prophets talking about Noah's ark and similar tales.
If you believe in a creator God, and you believe he cares for you, then
you have /got/ to believe he gave you rational sense for a purpose and
expects you to use it. If he wanted you to have blind faith in what
people tell you, he'd have made you a North Korean.
