In this post, I’ll be outlining some of the arguments that I find compelling in Robert A. Moore’s journal issue “The Impossible Voyage of Noah’s Ark” (link at the bottom).

There are many people in the United States and abroad that believe that the Christian Bible is the literal “Word of God,” and is therefore the undeniable truth. However, this is not true when it comes to the story of Noah’s Ark. In reality, Noah would have faced so many difficulties in his tasks of building the ark, finding the animals, and maintaining the animals on the voyage, that it would have been utterly impossible for the ark’s one-year voyage to even come close to being an actual historical event.

In the Bible, God tells Noah that “the length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits long, the breadth [width] of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits” (King James Version, Gen. 6:15). To even begin considering such a project, Noah would have had to possess an immaculate knowledge and education in the art of naval architecture, as well as in fields that would not arise for thousands of years, such as physics, calculus, mechanics, and structural analysis. Not to mention, ship building at that time (which was supposedly somewhere around six thousand years ago) did not surpass what would be thought of as dinghies when likened to the magnitude of the ark. Since this process took him about one hundred twenty years to complete (King James Version, Gen. 6:3), how was Noah somehow not faced with the wood rotting, just like modern wood ship builders of four to five years are? He would have continuously needed to replace the wood every four to five years (something that would be basically impossible to do, without starting the entire project over every time the wood rotted away), since the early phases of the ark would be rotted away by the time the next phase would be complete. A man and his sons building a ship of this magnitude would be the most outstanding accomplishment ever if it were true; with no known ship building heritage, and no known craftspeople to help him, how could someone be expected to believe that just Noah and his three sons, using Bronze Age tools, built a wooden ark of this colossal size, along with the scaffolding, docks, and the workshops necessary to build it?

In God’s commands to Noah, he tells Noah “…of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark…” (King James Version, Gen. 6:19). This is basically God telling Noah to bring two of every animal (male and female) onto the ark with him. God also says, “Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens…” and “Of fowls also by the air of sevens” (King James Version, Gen. 7:2-3). Robert A. Moore estimates through multiple calculations (which, for the sake of this post, I won’t include in here. To look further into his calculations, you can find it in his issue that is linked below) that this number adds up to 1,929,460 pairs, or 3,858,920 individual animals that Noah and his sons would have had to round up and capture (not counting plants or undiscovered animals that remain undiscovered today).

This is a ridiculous number of animals for four men centralized in the Middle East to find. How would they have gotten penguins from Antarctica, elephants from Africa, tigers from Siberia, and reindeer from Europe, and brought them all back to the Middle East before the other animals waiting at the ark died? Most of those animals would have most likely died in the process of getting there due to being exposed to climates that they are not suited to live in (for example, a penguin and polar bear would not be able to live in the Middle East’s hot climate), let alone a climate that has been formed from a global flood. Also, there must have been the very real problem of the animals killing each other, as animals do. It would be a miracle if that many animals survived the long journey to the middle east, the hot climate, the wait for departure, and the other hostile animals on board.

At this point in the story, Noah must have been doing some pretty intensely magical things. The last miracle he needed to perform was supplying food and clean water for all of these four million animals (and millions of plants) to last an entire year on a giant boat. So not only would Noah and his sons need to find all of these animals, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, but they would also need to gather food to sustain them all for an entire year (including many of the same animals to feed the predators).

Another problem would be the many tons of feces that these animals would’ve produced. Whatever the total, it would have been a horrifying amount on the overcrowded boat, more than enough to weigh down the boat and make it sink like a brick. Not to mention that feces are breeders of an infinite numbers of pathogens, and a source of noxious, choking fumes. This would have also killed a good majority of animals assuming that Noah and his 8-man crew didn’t have a way to get rid of this enormous amount of feces.

There are so many problems with this story that the entire thing simply defies nature, logic, and reasoning. This includes the idea that an almighty God created a flood with the purpose of murdering millions of people and animals all because humanity was wicked, while also allowing the human race to continue afterward anyway! Doesn’t that completely defeat the entire purpose of the flood that was supposed to destroy humanity?  And we still continue to do wicked things, so it didn’t solve that either.

These outlined arguments are only some of Robert A. Moore’s most compelling. There are plenty more in his easily navigable and comprehensive 43-page issue that he wrote on this subject, which can be found here: https://ncse.com/cej/4/1/impossible-voyage-noahs-ark. I strongly encourage anyone who is interested on this subject, believer or non-believer, to read this.