despite growing up with a picture of Noah's Ark on my bedroom wall I would go 25 years of my life without ever studying the story's historicity that was until one particular day when my dad recommended that for my next public talk I take a look at the outline 'the flood of Noah's day has meaning for us' a talk in which the number one objective is to convince the audience that the flood was a real historical event over the next couple of months I would go on to research every single drop of evidence put forward to support the Bible story as being historically true I would then reread the bible account and address very important questions that popped up into my mind over the process a process of which optimism turned to skepticism turned to mental despair how through isolating and dissecting just one bible story sent the infallibility of the entire bible crashing down did a man named peter ever actually walk on water? were thousands of people fed with just five loaves and two fish? and excluding the one-off Shrek was there ever a talking donkey?
whether you're a die-hard believer or a real skeptic there is no way today that you can prove or disprove that those things happened if you're going to believe they did you have to do it on faith but why I love this story so much is because faith doesn't need to enter into the picture if it's true that only 4 300 years ago there was a global flood which destroyed anything and everything in its path excluding just an ark of animals and eight humans then the evidence will be overwhelming we know there was a global flood because the bible clearly teaches it as a factual event to anyone well versed in logical fallacies this is a clear example of circular reasoning we know it's true because the bible says it's true it's like a Muslim saying we know the prophet Muhammad was a messenger of the true God because the Quran teaches it as fact or a Hindu saying we know that lord Shiva brought his beheaded son back to life because the Vedas teaches it as a factual event the problem on all three accounts is that if you don't share the same presuppositions as the one saying it it's completely ineffective reasoning what I was looking for was evidence that could not be refuted and I thought I found just that on page 328 of the insight book produced by Jehovah's witnesses I found a list of flood legends sourced from all over the world which on average share four out of the six basic similarities that the biblical flood story contains how can so many flood legends exist that share such common features with the biblical one? as Noah's descendants spread throughout the earth it seems that they retold the story of the flood in time however the story evidently became distorted into various forms the first time I saw this it kind of made sense especially considering what happened at the Tower of Babel over time the story was retold and retold until it got distorted into various forms but when I broke down the exact categories the locations and the details of these specific floods that hypothesis began to fall apart I first thought it was bizarre how watchtower included the category destruction by water now correct me if I'm wrong but I've never seen a major flood that hasn't brought some level of destruction by water this would be the equivalent of me doing a table to find humans similar to myself and including the box human one aspect that was more surprising to me though was that only half of these flood legends were of divine cause considering how in the biblical account god warns Noah god provides the specific building dimensions of the ark god brings the animals god brings the rain god shuts the door god approves of Noah's post-flood sacrifices god plays a massive role in this story but in almost half of these legends found all over the world a god or gods don't even feature if this hypothesis was true that the prevalence of flood legends derives from a singular event in genesis then we would expect these legends to exist irrespective of their location you would find some on islands some being told by people who live in a country which borders the sea and some being told by people who live a thousand miles in land but as you go through the list one by one you notice that nearly all of these legends are from islands or countries which border the sea and in the odd case you think they're not a small amount of research into the people and the tribes to which these flood legends derive reveal at one time they lived either by the sea or by major rivers to be honest considering how all these flood legends are derived from a period of time where they lived in ignorance of modern science in history I would be more surprised if they didn't have flood legends but if you're still convinced by that table in the insight book that every single flood legend in existence today is derived from the one flood legend in the bible then can we apply that same logic to earthquakes can we say that every single earthquake legend around the world is derived from the bible's viewpoint that god on occasion causes earthquakes still largely unsatisfied I would go on to read six books front to back two DVDs and do extensive research online analyzing the best evidence people put forward for the flood happening from woolly mammoths frozen in time to the genesis flood being revealed in Chinese picture symbols and remnants of marine life being found near the summit of some of the world's tallest mountains time and time again the recurring problem that I encountered with these pieces of apparent evidence was the fact that they couldn't be scientifically reinforced as fact they were simply speculation and assertions but just when I thought that I'd exhausted all lines of evidence I was about to hear of something which if true would be a complete game changer because when I went to see a couple in the family and I told them that the story of Noah's ark was one of the key reasons as to why I was having doubts in my faith they looked at me completely bemused and they said "well Haz what do you mean they have found Noah's ark! " I'm not sure what they'd been looking at but it certainly wasn't jw.
org even the website says that numerous expeditions have led to interesting claims but not to conclusive proof and that despite many efforts though the search for Noah's Ark is ongoing reading these books doing research online and talking to family members had only raised more questions than it had answered and so I decided it was time to stop desperately attempting to validate the story it was time to allow my own mind to address the questions that had been building up for the last couple of months and to re-read the biblical account of the flood through the lens of skepticism after Noah reached 500 years of age he became father to Shem, Ham and Japheth this was the first red flag that I encountered and it's before the flood story even begins if I wanted to maintain my belief that this story was true I'd also have to believe that in a world before contraception in a world in which no and his wife probably got married as soon as their bodies were physically able to they were having intimate moments for around 480 years without bearing a child and then bam there's three all at once mentally that didn't quite sit right didn't make sense and so I asked a family member that I respected for their opinion they said that because Noah was closer to Adam's perfection he probably had greater control of his reproductive powers you know when you hear something so bizarre and so wacky that you just need to take a step back to mentally process it I think what they were saying was that Noah almost used the force on his sperm to make sure that they didn't reach the egg and fertilize it hearing that off someone I respected so much made me realize that if I was going to keep any sort of faith in this story being real I was going to have to reach new levels of mental gymnastics because from this point on the story just gets even more difficult to rationalize with reality assuming that there were roughly the same number of species at the time of the flood as to today the total figure for the number of animals on board the ark would stand at approximately 2. 065 million online I saw different Christian denominations debate whether insects would have been on board the ark or not but none of them provided a valid explanation as to how these 1 million species of insects would survive without land food or fresh water in fact just through using the bible alone we realized that they must have been on board the ark you would have thought that a global flood would have provided the perfect opportunity for Jehovah a god of love kindness and empathy to eradicate insects such as mosquitoes fleas and ticks in the thousands of years after the flood Jehovah using his foreknowledge would have seen that billions of human lives would be ended by diseases spread by mosquitoes alone making them the world's most deadly animal but we can't judge Jehovah knows everything it must have been a wise decision to take them on board 2. 065 million is a figure that to many Christians sounds far too high but bear in mind that that figure doesn't include the thousands of species that have gone extinct between the ark finishing its voyage to today and the fact that Noah was actually instructed by God to take seven of many species and not two if the genesis story is correct when it says that they boarded on that very day the animals would have had to board the ark at the rate of 50 per second even without insects no would have still needed to board the animals at a rate of three every two seconds unless Jehovah provided a high speed conveyor belt to help the animals along onto the ark this would have been impossible but using that figure of 2.
065 million I was rather dubious as to whether all these animals would have even been able to fit on board the ark and after doing the necessary calculations let's just say that the animals would have become very familiar with each other but I was forgetting one very important factor Noah was instructed to collect and take enough food to last his family and every single animal on board for a time period which lasted over a year Mr and Mr. elephant require on average 600 pounds of food between them each day that's the same way as a 5x5 round bale of hay they would therefore have required the equivalent weight in food of 370 bales of hay during the trip that's around 222,000 pounds in reality Noah's Ark would have been nothing more than an enormous storage container to house the food for the animals if they wanted to begin boarding animals they'd about to spend another 50 years building Noah's ark the second Noah's ark's sister ship when I considered this point it impacted the story of Noah's ark the same way an iceberg impacted the story of the titanic but with those who are so determined to believe it such as Christians where there's a will to make something believable there's a way to make something believable and I should provide a big warning at this point if you possess even the slightest amount of knowledge of the animal kingdom the natural world and the theory of evolution and not from religious organizations publications then you may want to look away now under the heading could the Ark have held all the animals the insight book says it is true that encyclopedias refer to over a million species of animals but Noah was instructed to preserve only representatives of every kind of land animal and flying creature that means just 43 kinds of mammals 74 kinds of birds and 10 kinds of reptiles could have produced the great variety of species of these creatures that are known today they assert that within the space of only 4,300 years 43 kinds of mammals have evolved into over 5,500 species one kind of monkey got off the ark 4,300 years later we now have over 330 species of monkey according to that evolutionary rate of 1 into 330 if we were to travel 4,300 years into the future we would witness a world plagued by 108,900 species of monkey what is the most unbelievably ironic thing here is that this organization takes every opportunity to slate and rubbish the theory of evolution but when they need it to make the numbers of this story even remotely possible they assert the most aggressive and rapid form of evolution imaginable when I first reflected on this point I was sat at my desk looking at my musk turtle thinking are you one of the 356 species of turtle that is derived from just one 4,300 years ago but the more time I studied the environment that my turtle was in the more questions I asked I eventually landed at reasoning which not one person I talked to was able to refute because my turtle was in a sealed container being fed a specific diet with a UV light providing both UVA and UVB with a basking area with enough water at the correct ph level with a water purifier to cleanse the water and remove waste and a water heater so that the temperature would stay in the perfect range if any one of those criteria weren't met then my turtle would likely die in fact just a few days later my turtle did die despite me trying my very best to ensure its survival now for multiple reasons the turtle would not have been able to survive off the Ark in the global ocean but it'd be equally absurd to suggest that onboard the ark without modern technology and equipment it would have been able to survive how Mr and Mr. turtle made it off the ark alive only god knows but they did five months after beginning its journey Noah's ark finally came to rest atop mount Ararat in turkey from the starting point to the finishing point traveling in a straight line it's a distance of around 450 miles considering this was a global flood this doesn't seem a massive distance why didn't the ark rest atop mount Aconcagua in Argentina or mount Mckinley in Alaska mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania or mount Everest in Nepal you would have thought that all of those mountains along with hundreds of others which are elevated higher than mount Ararat would provide more likely destinations for the final point of Noah's ark but what we need to bear in mind is that the writers of this story had no idea that any of these mountains even existed they had no idea that many of these continents even existed their entire world was not our entire world could there be a more rational explanation as to why Noah's ark ended up on top of mount Ararat aside from any other mountain well although earlier we stated how varied and how unrelated many of these ancient flood legends are there does exist a small cluster of flood legends which bear a strong resemblance to each other and these all derive from ancient Mesopotamia what's now today the Iraqi flood plain in Sumer Noah was known as Ziasudra in Akkad he was known as Atrahasis in the Babylon epic he was known as Utnapishtim in this region when the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers burst their banks the surrounding terrain could be filled like a ginormous bathtub both geologists and archaeologists have found convincing evidence that there was a flood here up to 22 feet in height around the year 2900 B.
C centered on the city of Shurrupak needless to say that many humans could have died many animals could have died but for royalty or those in high places who have access to a boat they along with their own personal menagerie of animals could have survived now safely atop the flood waters where was the one place within a relative close proximity to them which they'd either visited in person or heard about which would not be impacted in any way by these flood waters mount Ararat to a biblical literalist they will say don't talk such nonsense if this book says it was a global flood it was a global flood if this book says that the ark finished its voyage on mount Ararat in Turkey then that's what happened this book does not lie well fortunately we live in a time period where we don't have to take any one person's word that the story is true we don't even have to take the bible at face value because there is a foolproof method of determining whether the story is historically sound what we can do is we can analyze the geographical dispersity of animal species across the entire planet in theory the closer you get to mount Ararat and Turkey and its surrounding countries the more numerous and more varied the life forms will be the further away you get from that focal point the less numerous and less varied the animal life will be using mammal statistics from the IUCN in 2016 this is a list of the 23 countries in the world which are home to the most species of mammals based upon their geographical distance from mount Ararat and the possibility of mammal species migrating to these locations should we expect these countries to be where they are on the list if Noah's ark is a true story if anything this list reveals almost the exact opposite of what we would expect Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq well they're nowhere to be seen the more questions you ask regarding this story's historicity the more you receive the resounding answer it's not true organizations like Jehovah's Witnesses are fully aware of this fact they know just how minimal and how desperate any evidence is in support of this story being possible let alone true they know that if one of their members attempts to isolate and examine this story's historicity it could lead to their entire tower of faith crumbling to the floor and them leaving the organization and so what do they do well they have one final trick stored up their sleeve just for this occasion Jesus Paul and Peter accepted the flood as historical and used it as a warning Jesus Christ plainly stated Noah entered into the ark and the flood arrived this is the best evidence possible Jesus was in heaven before he came to earth he watched the building of the ark he saw the flood when considered from that standpoint the evidence that Noah's ark existed is already overwhelming or as my dad put it are you calling Jesus Christ a liar to an indoctrinated mind this diversion method works to absolute perfection just like a magician who diverts the audience's attention from what's really going on they attempt to divert the attention away from Noah's Ark and proving whether it's true or not to Jesus Christ a being who gave up his exalted position in heaven and suffered a truly agonizing death so that they could receive everlasting life they are reminding you that if you question the flood story you are inadvertently questioning Jesus Christ himself how dare you! ?
