How did he feed them all?
How did he clean up the waste?
How did he gather them all?
How did he get them to all to successfully mate?
How did he fit them on the boat?
How did fish survive with all that fresh water in the ocean?(or did he have 3 million aquariums on board?)
I can’t quite put my finger on it…but something does not add up here… :dubious:
He didn’t have every species, he had every ‘kind’. Duh.
Just don’t ask for a coherent or useful definition of ‘kind’, or details of how speciation within ‘kind’ (but nothing more evolution-y than that) is possible.
How does Bugs Bunny speak English (okay, Brooklynese…but close enough)? Stories are stories. No mystery there.
I se you are new to the Dope. Welcome.
You might, however, consider rewording your post. It is hard to tell if you are intentionally showing the absurdity of taking that particular story seriously as a factual desription of events, so you can provoke thesitic (or, more specifically, Judeo-Christian theistic) Dopers into a response. There is a glut of threads right now on the absurdities of theism, and I don’t think yours is going to add much to the debate.
If you are, instead, interested in possible, more or less verifiable real events that may have inspired the Noah myth (and other flood myths in Bronze Age Eurasian cultures), such as the geological filling in of the Black Sea basin, then you might be specific about this. You could also approach in a kind of psycho-cultural way, if you’re curious about what human needs or desires are fulfilled by recounting this particular myth.
Okay, I just now enjoyed a few minutes from various parts of that instructive animated production. It’s mildly funny, that’s true.
Listen, parodies of received-religion-holy-book-stories have their place. But it just seems like such an endless (and easy) target. I don’t think they can do much convincing of many Biblical literalists to change their minds. People who take Bronze Age myths seriously as factual accounts are dimwitted (or brainwashed-as-children) enough that they would probably just be offended by such lege-majeste. Meanwhile, folks who are most likely to be at best mildly amused by it, like myself, are just the ones who need no such convincing at all.
But who knows? Maybe if we spread those videos, and others like them, around, we might just catch an impressionable young person, indoctrinated in Biblical literalism, in time. Kind of like those “It gets better” videos that Dan Savage, Tim Gunn, et al. promote.
What is a kind? Could one pair of cats take care of lions, tigers, cougars, and Fluffy? Could one bird pair take care of all birds of prey, another pair for all aquatic birds including penguins*?
*Mentioned only because penguins are cool
This is also one of the counter arguments to the unguided theory of evolution, where there are animal ‘kinds’ (or souls) which allow a good deal variation within a kind, but can a particular kind can not vary outside it’s limits set by God.
This was the de-arking instruction:
Gen 8:17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.”
Which may indicate the kind becoming the multiple species.
Noah was to gather all the food for them:
Gen 6:21 You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.”
The actually method I don’t know
?
They came to him and entered the ark
Gen 6:20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.
Gen 7:8 Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, 9 male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah.
The Lord made Noah bring male/female pairs, the wild animals know what to do from there, though the livestock may require help, but probably could have went without for 40 days.
It seems like the animals fit themselves in “came to Noah and entered the ark”
Noah was not instructed to do fish, and it seemed to indicate that this was a land flood and land and air animals perished. Sea may not have been effected.
Presumably with Gods aid. Seriously, what did you think was the answer? It’s just a story, and even if you take it as literal truth, God presumably created the entire universe and all the species in it…keeping them alive on a big ass boat (and making the boat in the first place, as well as getting all the species there from all over the world and back again after the event, making an unpowered boat that would be inherently unstable be able to survive massive waves and storm, getting water of that volume on the earth to cause the flood in the first place then back off again, etc etc etc and blah blah blah) would be nothing. Power of God and all that.
It’s a must watch for the biblical scholar types.
