David Rives
Many skeptics of the Bible, and even fellow Christians, have wondered how Noah could have fit all the millions of animal species on the Ark. He would have needed a fleet of cargo ships!
But Noah didn’t take all the species on the Ark.
Noah was only commanded to take every kind of land-dwelling, air-breathing animal on the Ark. While we always picture two giraffes and then two cows, and so on, the Bible actually says that Noah took seven pairs of some. But doesn’t this make the problem worse?
Let’s look more closely.
Noah didn’t have to take any sea creatures with him and he might not have had to take all of the insects or small invertebrates either. This dramatically reduces the number of creatures on the voyage.
So Noah took the terrestrial amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals along with him. But he didn’t need to include two of each amphibian, reptile, bird, or mammal species. Noah was told by God to take two of every kind. This biblical classification term “kind” is not synonymous with the much more recent term “species.”
It is far more broad.
Genesis 1 tells us that all creatures were created to reproduce according to their kinds. Some recent creation scientists have researched what this would mean, and have informally dubbed this study “Baraminology.” They’ve done research to try and figure out what the biblical “kind” compares to in our modern classification scheme. They’ve found that, in most cases, these distinctions occur at the “family” level. This means Noah didn’t need two lions, two tigers, two leopards, two house cats, two lynx, two jaguars, two cheetahs, and so on. He just needed two representatives of the entire cat kind, with a robust genetic sequence. From those, we can get all of the variety we see today very quickly.
Did you know there are only 510 amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal families alive today, including the aquatic families? Now, we don’t know for sure how many families have gone extinct since creation, but it’s estimated that 70% of mammal families have gone extinct. If we assume this same number for the other groups, then the upper limit of “kinds” Noah needed on the Ark is just 1,700. With two of each kind, and seven pairs of some, only a few thousand individual animals were needed on the Ark.
The Ark was a massive cargo ship. It had more than enough room for a few thousand animals, their food and supplies, along with Noah and his family.
This is encouraging for anyone who might have been skeptical because it shows us that we can trust the history recorded in God’s Word…
I’m David Rives. Truly…the heavens declare the glory of God
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A Flood Of Evidence Book – 40 Reasons Why Noah And The Ark Still Matter | Ken Ham and Bodie Hodge | AIG
There are hosts of books and resources on the Flood and Noah’s ark in the creation movement. Yet, there has been a glaring problem in this area for 50 years. There wasn’t one basic laymen book on the Flood and Noah’s Ark to give answers to those questions asked all the time. A Flood of Evidence solves this problem.
In the Big Bang model for the formation of the universe, Inflationary Cosmology predicts that after about 10−37 seconds[10] the nascent universe underwent exponential growth that smoothed out nearly all irregularities. The remaining irregularities were caused by quantum fluctuations in the inflaton field that caused the inflation event.[11] Before the formation of stars and planets (after 10−6 seconds), the early universe was smaller, much hotter, and filled with a uniform glow from its white-hot fog of interacting plasma of photons, electrons, and baryons.
As the universe expanded, adiabatic cooling caused the energy density of the plasma to decrease until it became favorable for electrons to combine with protons, forming hydrogen atoms. This recombination event happened when the temperature was around 3000 K or when the universe was approximately 379,000 years old.[12] As photons did not interact with these electrically neutral atoms, the former began to travel freely through space, resulting in the decoupling of matter and radiation.[13]
Hello Alexis – thanks for sharing your thoughts. However, they would be more relevant on a different post – perhaps one of the articles by Duane Caldwell? Here is a link to some of his articles
https://thecreationclub.com/author/dcaldwell/