Think for a moment about the creationist’s own views of Noah’s Ark and the Flood. This was a cataclysmic event: Over a month of intense rainfall, gigantic fountains of water erupting from the deep, and in some pseudoscientific versions, a canopy of metallic hydrogen surrounding the earth exploded in an interaction with the almost pure oxygen of Earth’s atmosphere, converting 80% of that oxygen into water that deluged the planet. At the Creation “Museum”, Ken Ham imagines a wall of water hundreds of feet high crashing into the land in a kind of super-tsunami that swept all the way into the center of the continents. The Genesis Flood imagines that most major geological features were generated in this relatively brief event — the Himalayas were thrown up, the Grand Canyon gouged out. Forests were shredded, and the oceans were clotted with debris. Ham argues that there were huge floating rafts of logs and dirt adrift on the seas immediately afterwards, that were used by the survivors — those few organisms on the Ark — to drift to all the newly formed continents afterwards.
Oh, yeah, the Ark. Big wooden barge. It survived all of that chaos.
One has to wonder, then, why Ken Ham couldn’t have used 4,000 year old building techniques to assemble an indestructible floating wooden frame in his Ark Park, or how come the Dutch model of the Ark crumpled when it bumped into a boat in Oslo?
That’s the thing about creationists: they want to imagine that their all-powerful god wields immense cosmic forces and emphasize the dramatic, catastrophic power of their world-killing flood, but at the same time they can’t even comprehend the energies involved in an ocean swell.
We even have video of the collision! It’s a slow-motion bump.
Ah yes, but are we sure that the Dutch ark didn’t crumple as a result of an allergic reaction to modern boats? Sure, sure, the original had to survive being pummelled by bits of tree, vast masses of water, and probably a cliff or two as the waters rose, but none of that involved anti-fouling paint!
Looks like some good came from that trip after all.
You only have to consider the relative seafaring accomplishments of the Ancient (pre?-)Israelis and the Dutch to see why.
If you look closely at the waterline of the ark you’ll notice it appears to be built on top of a metal boat. Judging from the rust streaks, that’s steel, just like Noah’s ark. Probably electro-welded just like Noah’s was. Look at the way the front stove in, but the metal boat is solid! If the whole thing was built to the mediocre standards of the upper work, the entire bow would have collapsed and it’d be “sinking ark” pictures we’d be looking at.
How creationists build a boat: buy a boat, then build a boat on top of it.
You can be more or less certain that the metal barge-part was built by professionals because it’s still floating.
Tsk, Marcus. Next you’ll be saying the ark didn’t have glass windows
Forget building a boat to survive a catastrophic flood.
Religion has existed for, what, 20 times longer than modern science? If there was any merit to any of it, they should have built a prototype universe by now. Their god managed to build everything in six days and after 5,000-odd years to figure out how, they can’t even manage a proof of concept with simple laws of physics that reaches heat death within milliseconds?
There’s something awfully poetic about that.
A creationist builds Noah’s Ark by purchasing a boat built by science and then adding extraneous cruft that diminishes its actual function. I’m sure that’s a metaphor for something but I can’t quite figure out what.
Look at the inner structures of the ark, where the front is torn open! Looks like glass wool insulation (just like Noah used) and upper ‘ribs’ about 4 feet apart, covered with a light cladding of wood strips. Judging how one region of the strips is flexing off as a unit, one wonders if the cladding was assembled onto a 4×8′ standard plywood sheet, then installed. Either way, it looks like plywood sheets like Noah had. Basically it’s a stick-built house, all the boaty stuff is the barge on the bottom. I remember touring Nelson’s “Victory” and being amazed by the huge beams it’s made of. Sailing ships need to cope with some amazing pressures, especially warships, and we can forgive the ark for lacking masts or even a way to steer, but there’s no way that flimsy construction made out of 2x4s and plywood would survive floating on a pond, let alone at sea. Presumably the ark would have faced extreme weather. Even built on a metal barge, that thing would swamp pretty fast in any kind of rough weather.
Anyone want to bet there’s no diesel engine and a propellor and a hydraulic rudder hidden down in the metal barge? It appears to have attempted to move on its own: how?
What the everliving fuck is that thing on the ark’s bow?
@Marcus Ranum, 7
Um, the power of prayer? I mean, hello? :P
Ah – the article says that it was being towed when it hit the coast guard ship. Which was moored at the time. So, for all intents and purposes the ark park parked on the quay, the coast guard ship just happened to be in the spot they hit.
So it got from Holland to Norway somehow. I guess it just goes where the flood takes it, right? Joking aside, I wouldn’t want to be on that thing in even moderate weather. Maybe they had some real sailors in a real ship just tow the thing (ready to cut it loose and let it sink at a moment’s notice)
According to http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2016/04/26/massive-life-size-replica-noah-ark-set-sail-brazil-johan-ark/83533226/
They were threatening to take it to Brazil. I hope that some seapeople are involved in talking them out of that idea. I wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt, but the headline “noah’s ark sinks” in a minor storm… Send in the FAIL boat!
Badland@#8:
Maybe it’s a corvus :) You know, a drop-ramp the legionnaires can charge across after they ram.
If you look closely at the waterline of the ark you’ll notice it appears to be built on top of a metal boat.
It is indeed. Here is the story of this “ark.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan%27s_Ark
And it probably wasn’t even marine ply, just some recycled packing crates.
One decent size wave at sea would sweep that super-structure from the barge in one go. A 60 foot rogue wave would take the barge with it.
God was being imitated, not directly involved as He was with the original Ark. Now He got other stuff to do instead of rescuing a single family from his wrath. Who were saved to spread the word, to fear Him or get drowned with everybody else. Imitating God does not make one as powerful as God, that’s what prayer is all about. Hoping God will hear the pleas and show some mercy a lift a finger to give a little help.
/sarc
ohhh:
+ sarcasm /
it’s a trap of course, to identify all the people laughing at this little incident, so God can mark us as unholy with his mighty pen.
/ – sarcasm
I saw pictures of this monstrosity being build and noted that the timber straking was featheredge, a very poor quality and cheap timber used for cladding barns. From the point of view of model makers it makes the model look as if it is clinker built (overlapping boards like a viking ship).
Needless to say both the material and the method of lapping would be entirely unsuitable for building a large vessel.
The REAL ark had the Hand o’ Gawd protecting it. You know, the one that will lift from this nation any moment now because we let gays marry and trans people poop and women preach and the gummint own land that belongs to the
ranchersPeople. Makes you wonder why Noah had to build a boat. Mysterious ways, right?Why have they dragged that pile of crap to Norway?
The Norwegians know how to build real boats http://www.drakenexpeditionamerica.com
That shed on a barge is only fit for burning!
Well, to be fair, the water looked pretty rough…
If that tug pilot is a local, they’ll never live that down. “Hej Ark-bøy! Have you sunk any cøast gaard ships?” #notaviking
Fortunately, the ark was built over an old garbage scow, as a timesaver.
An atmosphere of almost pure oxygen? Whoa, that’s new to me. I’d heard the “canopy of water”, but not the canopy of elements.
Whoever proposed it is aware, of course, that many ordinary items–cloth, hair, people–are close to spontaneously combustible in high-oxygen atmospheres? And, no one could ever have risked lighting a fire: even a lightning strike to a tree would have caused a world-wide conflagration.
Also, of course the proposer also knows that oxygen in high percentages is toxic to humans?
Do tell who proposed this theory!
Assuming this Ark model is built to be full scale, I love the size comparison between it and the cruise ship in the background. Don’t creationists get any cognitive dissonance when they get such an obvious example of how small the Ark actually is?
But God put a hole in that ark, because of….. homosexuals. Yes he was angry at all the homosexuals in Sweden and so he put a hole in a boat in Norway. /s
@22Michael — I laughed at the size differential too, but for a different reason. biblical dimensions of the Ark are too massive to be structurally feasible, as in, considerably bigger than any ship in the U.S. Navy. I think PZ may even have discussed it here a couple of years back. So my impression of that floating thingie there is that it’s a fraction of the putative size of the Actual Word Of God Floating Thingie. Because to follow the Actual Word Of God would be impossible by even the engineering standards of today.
How many animals were harmed in the destruction of the ship?
One has to wonder, then, why Ken Ham couldn’t have used 4,000 year old building techniques to assemble an indestructible floating wooden frame in his Ark Park, or how come the Dutch model of the Ark crumpled when it bumped into a boat in Oslo?
Ken actually tried to answer that question, with all the rationality we’ve come to expect from him.
First paragraph was supposed to be in a blockquote.
Also, for those who don’t want to click the link, he’s claiming that Noah may have had advanced technology that we can’t replicate.
I guess the Dutch coast guard has chari…. I mean, patrol boats of iron?
“professionals built the Titanic”
Who build the iceberg?
People claiming that a 450′ (300 cubit) wooden sea-going vessel is impossible, or even impractical, should have a look beyond their local marina.
Ptolemy’s Tessarakonteres is reckoned to have been over 400′, though by all accounts it steered like a pregnant cow and seldom left port, but that’s not really relevant to a free-floating, barge-like ark. Zheng He’s treasure ships at around 400′, perhaps more, perhaps less, were seaworthy enough to navigate the Indian Ocean several times. The Wyoming’s problems with leakage are often brought up in these discussions, but I think could be put down to inexperience with construction at such sizes, and nothing that couldn’t have been designed around, if steel hulls hadn’t been available and better all round.
The dead-tree edition of the International New York Times had a rather interesting article on this collision today, Replica of Noah’s Ark Is Damaged in Oslo Harbor Collision. It turns out there are two arks, both built by some fruitcake in the Netherlands. The one that rammed the coast guard ship was the smaller of the two.
There is apparently an upcoming opportunity for an even more hilarious incident (assuming it doesn’t sink enroute with people trapped aboard):
However, gatecrashing the Paralympic Games is not so funny.
The biblical flood is an embellished version of the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It only rained for seven days and nights, and the story is clear that it was the river that jumped it banks and proceeded to level the city, and destroy all the surrounding fields and canals. It might even be based on the real flood that destroyed Ur.
Christians tend to get all upset when I point out that their holy book is stolen directly from the Babylonions, and the slaves changed the story to omit any references to the goddesses and gods of the city that owned them. Ditto the garden of Eden story, where the snake is the source of wisdom, the trees belong to the goddess Asherah, and their god is an evil upsurper called Lord of the Blind.
“how come the Dutch model of the Ark crumpled when it bumped into a boat in Oslo?”
‘Cuz God wants stupid ‘Merrican commie nazi evilotionist Darwinist athiests to know that the Dutch are the world wide leaders of arkology, not that phoney Aussie from Kentucky.
The real thing – this one
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Big_Ark_in_Dordrecht_3.jpg
is going to Brazil, doing the god’s work.
Eat your heart out, Ken!
Anyone planning to donate some bucks to a Dutch fruitcake can do so:
http://arkofnoah.org/
Come on, PZ, empty your pockets! No doubt you have a dime to spare.
blf — Right, the one damaged in Oslo was about half the dimensions given in the Bible for the Ark. In addition to the steel barge that it sits on, it has a steel frame. So Hubers’ Ark is a cheat all the way around. Given the pictures of the full size version, I find it very difficult to believe that they can successfully tow it across the Atlantic to Brazil. I certainly wouldn’t sign on.
What a maroon — No animals were harmed in the making of this fiasco. Hubers’ Ark doesn’t have live animals, except for a small petting zoo. They were hopefully not on board.
NelC — What I’ve read is that the few reliably known wooden ships larger that 400 feet had numerous difficulties with sea worthiness, not that they are impossible. However, all the reliably known ships in that range…actually more like 350 feet…ended up sinking or being scraped. I’m skeptical of any claims before relatively modern times including the two you site, for the same reason I’m skeptical of the Biblical narrative…ancient people liked to brag and/or clearly understood the power of propaganda.
While the Wyoming did have an overall length of 450 feet, that was from jib-boom tip to spanker boom tip. The deck length was a mere 350 feet. Even with iron cross bracing, it had trouble with flexing in heavy seas causing planks to buckle. The planks were pine, so perhaps if they had used something like teak…who knows. It did actually make money hauling coal for almost 2 decades, but it eventually foundered in a nor’easter off Massachusetts.
The Arbuckullis was a French iron-clad that was 115 meters long, although 15 meters of that was a ram. So the ship itself was only about 328 feet long. The ship made only one ocean voyage from New York, where it was built, to France because it handled so poorly.
Note that the relative success of all these modern large wooden ships relied on iron and steel, technologies not available to a person living four or five thousand years ago. Unless you buy the god did a miracle story.
It’s actually a wooden barn built on top of a steel barge.
Robro@34: Actually, the one in Oslo is apparently half the length and slightly less than half the width, but the full height of the biblical dimensions. That’s got to be bad for its stability.
I really want to see what happens if Ham’s ark were to be put into water. And sailed(?) through a force 9 storm. Doubt if the Coast Guard would let it as they’d have to perform the rescue and would prefer to prevent such a debacle.
I really want to see what would happen if Ham’s ark were to be put into water. And sailed(?) through a force 9 storm. Doubt if the Coast Guard would let it as they’d have to perform the rescue and would prefer to prevent such a debacle.
Sorry for the double post.
Robro @34, I think you’ll find that being scrapped or sinking is the usual fate of boats; only a lucky few make it into a museum without sinking first. ;)
Anyway, my point was that a seaworthy wooden ship on the order of 400′ long is not so improbable, and neither is the existence of a leaky Wyoming any kind of proof of impossibility. What’s more unconvincing is that a landbound herder of goats (or whatever Noah’s occupation was before the divine inspiration) would have access to the skills and resources that are necessary to have any chance of building a large and seaworthy(-if-only-for-forty-days) vessel.
Certainly these twerps with their buildings built to resemble boats and shacks built on steel barges do nothing to increase the credibility of their biblical claims.
It merely rained for 40 days; after that the ark had to stay afloat at least another 150 days until it comes to rest on the top of Mt. Ararat. So at least 190 days total. Then it’s another 2.5 months or so until the tops of mountains can be seen, which doesn’t make sense given that the ark is already sitting on a mountain. Actually, the whole story is plagued with inconsistencies.
A 450 ft. wooden boat being able to stay afloat for that long without steel reinforcement and constant pumping (via it’s 8 crew members) is indeed wildly improbable. Which is just one of many, many insanely improbable things about it. At that point you can either accept that the whole thing is made-up, or go the miracle route and claim that God just magicked everything to make it work. In neither case does the size of the boat even matter.
Area Man, you’r being a bit unfair. There may have only been 8 humans on board, but a system of treadmills where animals are shackled with predators behind prey would clearly have been used to provide the motive power to pump out the water leakage and tons of excrement overboard.