Young earth creationists love to talk about how there really was a global Deluge and that there were dinosaurs aboard the Ark, but rarely do you see any attempt on their part to visualize what life was like on Noah's ship. What did Noah and his family do to while away the hours? How did they manage to feed all the animals (and make sure the animals didn't feed on each other)? What happened when an animal got sick? These are absurd questions because there is no evidence for a global Flood or that a man named Noah commanded a ship full of two of every species, but they are valid questions if you seriously believe in the myth. I am not aware of any straight-faced creationist explanations of life on the Ark (I'm half expecting links to such efforts to soon appear in the comments), but a 1915 book called The Log of the Ark by I.L. Gordon and A.J. Frueh took a humorous approach to what day-to-day life on the Ark might have been like.
Modern creationists would be pleased to see prehistoric creatures aboard the Ark in this book, even if the authors sometimes flaunted their lack of scientific training by using a smattering of scientific names and creating caricatures of fierce dragons. The entry on page 22, accompanied by the above illustration, reads;
SUNDAY. Course--straight ahead.
Weather--rain. Wind--cool. Sea--same. Ship's Run--2.
Remarks :
No services. Shem ran into my cabin this morning. He was greatly excited. He said the bothriospondylus madagascariensis, the metriorhynchus superciliosus, and the long-horned brontotherium had climbed out of their stalls, and were fighting with the macanchenia patagonica and the testudo periniana. I went downstairs and found that the bothriospondylus madagascariensis, the metriorhynchus superciliosus, and the long-horned brontotherium were not fighting with the macanchenia patagonica and the testudo periniana, but with the sceliditherium leptocephalum and the pachydiscus peramphus. The noise of the battle awoke the machairodus negasus, the horplophorus ornatus, and the pareiasaurus serridens. They began to purr. It was a good thing for me I was not stepped on while stopping the fight. Gol darn the fellow who gave animals such names.
Let's see here. We've got the brachiosaurid Bothriospondylus, the crocodile-like Metriorhynchus, the perissodactyl Brontotherium, the litoptern Macrauchenia, some sort of tortoise (Testudo), the ground sloth Scelidotherium, the ammonite Pachydiscus, the sabercat Machairodus, the glyptodont Hoplophorus, and the Permian reptile Pareiasaurus. (In many cases the trivial names seem to have been mixed-and-matched with genus names and don't represent real species. Macrauchenia patagonica is an exception to this trend.) This makes me wonder what a purring glyptodont or pareiasaurid would sound like, but somehow I have the feeling that the authors just skimmed through a book on paleontology (or took a walk through a museum) and picked out a few strange-sounding names. If such creatures were all collected together, though, I imagine that Noah would have to worry about being squished by Bothriospondylus and have to practice dentistry when the Machairodus broke a tooth on the shell of Hoplophorus.
- Log in to post comments
You'd think Noah and his family would be too busy hiding from velociraptors to worry about the other dinosaurs.
Says it all
Read Not Wanted on the Voyage by Timothy Findley (link here to Amazon). The story will never seem the same again.
I've had people tell me with a straight face that dinosaurs were aboard Noah's ark, but they never gave me any plausible explanation of how that would work. Of course, if they believed in plausible things, they wouldn't buy that ridiculous story in the first place!
When I was a kid, I had a 45rpm story-record about the last unicorn. The poor beast was off doing something rather evil and apparently missed the "last call" to get on the ark, thus wiping out its species. The picture on the record sleeve was a sad looking unicorn, tear in eye, looking over its shoulder as the ark floated away under dark clouds.
I wish I had half of that dark creativity in me.
I believe there have been cross-referenced historical references to a substantial tsunami from different cultures that could have been the, well, genesis of the story that ultimately became the great flood. The data has many conflicts (a quick web search made to support my Discovery-channel-distant-memory produced many more annoying results than valid information), but it makes a certain amount of sense that the myth would be rooted in a drastic actual event. A rich family drowns in a flood while an old man who maintains their farm animals luckily floats on a beam of wood, saving a calf in the process, and the story exaggerates over time.
Regarding the dinosaurs on the boat...I think we all can agree it was an intelligent ancestor of Harry Potter who saved them from the great flood, only to be outdone by Granddad Voldemort who was angry at the beasts for crushing his favorite caldron. Duh.
I probably had the same 45 of The Unicorn Song. Fortunately, I never confused it with actual history and biology!
I've always imagined something like this.
http://sneerreview.blogspot.com/2008/09/creation-science-finally-solves…
For awhile, I believed the myth to be completely true when I was a kid. Now that I'm older, I have the common sense to to see the absurdity of the myth.
...and then therre was the Charles Addams cartoon (probably originally in the "New Yorker," reprinted in one of the collections of his cartoons) of a pair of unicorns, standing in the rain on the top of a wave-washed rock, looking wistfully out to sea as the Ark sailed off...
So wait... let me get this straight. Having never been exposed to that bunk before, they say that Dinosaurs survived the flood but *unicorns* went extinct?
...
*defies words*
Enigma
Okay, so assuming that all the thousands of known prehistoric creatures had indeed boarded this ark without over-crowding it, why are they all extinct now? NO creationist to my knowledge has EVER provided an explaination for this other than a half-a$$ed attempt to cite 'cryptids' as living dinosaurs/plesiosaurs/homonids/pterosaurs/etc..
Re: Feeding all the animals. You haven't been keeping up with YEC apologetics. AIG claims that "min" is much broader than species and that post Noah there was a period of extremely fast "microevolution" to get all the species we have today. They've trumpeted examples of fast evolution as supporting YECism. This also helps them explain how all the animals could fit on the Ark.
I've heard two answers from YECs on this issue, which they always admit to being speculative. One is that Noah didn't take adults, but babies, or maybe in many instances eggs. They imagine a brimming hatchery rather than cages stuffed with combative adults.
They second speculation I've heard is that god could have helped Noah by placing the animals in a type of suspending animation, so they wouldn't require food or water, excrete, or fight amongst themselves. Basically was sailing a ship filled with stuffed animals that magically came back alive once he set them loose.
The most hilarious explanations come from Charley on 'GodTube'.
He manages the miracle of explaining how kangeroos managed to hop from the middle east all the way to Australia without leaving a single kangeroo fossil in the intervening lands (fossilization is a rare process so you shouldn't expect to see such fossils) - just after using the exact same absence of missing link fossils as his 'proof' that evolution is false!
I find both evolution and YEC to be unbelieveable and both sides do a very poor job of defending their respective positions. So I am left with the choice of having to choose one because neither view is provable or really that convincing. It's all chasing after the wind.
Kurt; I disagree that evolutionary science is "chasing after the wind." What is it that you find unsubstantiated about evolution? Given what has been learned in the past 20 years alone I find it strange that anyone can simply sweep aside all the research that has been done as if it were nothing. There is certainly much to learn, but we are not whistling in the dark either.