Rant on.

I like a good fairy tale.  The characters are often two-dimensional, true–they are good or bad, rarely a mix–but the good always wins and the bad always loses in some terrible way.  To any reasonable adult, it’s obvious the story is just that, a story.  A bit of fiction with no connection to reality.  And yet there are plenty who want to believe in fairy tales well into adulthood, no matter the evidence against them.

I watched a video the other day by comedian Ricky Gervais in which he discussed one of the more famous such fairy tale:  Noah’s Ark.  He made fun of the story in general, not really attacking its lack of reality much.  He did make at least one interesting point, though.  According to the story, God looked down at Earth and saw it was filled wicked people.  So he decided to flood the Earth and wipe everything out, allowing only Noah and his family and two of every animal to survive.

Wait, what?  Humans are being wicked, so all of the animals will be wiped out except for two?  This is the kind, loving God of Christianity committing near genocide on every single species on the planet.  This seems a little irrational at best.

Also, it’s not particularly feasible.  If the population of a species is down to one pair, the species is done with.  Doomed.  Assuming the pair is male and female, they can procreate, sure, and then…well, the kids are only going to have each other or their parents for potential mates.  In humans, this is taboo, and for good reason.  The offspring of inbreeding often has a lot of problems.  Some of the offspring might come out okay–it’s always a possibility–but their still only going to have close relatives to continue the species.  It just isn’t viable.

The ark would not be big enough to fit two of every species anyway.  Mr. Gervais alludes to this, gesturing at the classic image of the animals marching in a two-by-two line to the ark.  There’s already a pair of giraffes in the boat, and they’re taking up a bit of space.  A boat large enough to hold two of every species hasn’t been built yet with modern technology, Noah would not have been able to do so.  Even if he did, food supply would be short, especially for the herbivores.  The omnivores and carnivores might be okay, but only at the expense of cutting down that immense population of animals on the boat.

The physics of a rain lasting forty days and nights and flooding the Earth are a bit silly, too.  Scroll down a bit on the link, it gives the math for what Earth would be like if it were covered with water.  The short version is air pressure would be very different for something floating on the surface of the flood, and so would the temperature (because of the pressure).  Neither would be survivable.

Then there’s Noah himself.  The entire population of Earth is wicked…except for one guy?  This is as black and white as any pair of fairy tale characters (or sets of characters) can get.  One can accept easily enough that Noah was a nice guy…until you realize he built his boat and let everybody he knew and didn’t know just drown when the flood came.  Sorry, this just doesn’t quite ring true.

And yet, folks buy into the Noah’s Ark story.  So much that people today are looking for remnants of the ark and occasionally thinking they have found it.  They ignore the physics of it, the historical records of civilizations which existed through the time of the flood and did not report any extraordinary rainfall, the impossibility of all the animals, the flood stories of earlier civilizations which Noah’s tale borrows from heavily…all of it.  None of that matters, but I wish it did.  Noah’s Ark is a nice little story, but it’s just that:  A story, a work of fiction.  Get over it.

Rant off.