How to 'age' a fossil the fundie way!

I happened across this advice, thanks to a friend's Facebook page.  We wouldn't want to be led astray by science would we?

How to determine the Geological Age of a fossil - not like this!

Strangely, some of the advice seems almost sensible, but I don't think I can agree with the whole of any of the five points except number 4.

But why do they specify that it is the 'Geological Age', not just 'the age', and why put "Age" in quotes like that?  If point 5 is true, then the age is well defined, but let's face it, it isn't true and we all know it, even though the fundies exhort us to believe all that nonsense about 'the flood'.

Noah, Abraham and morality

An anonymous but interesting friend left a comment yesterday on my post "Things Christians Say, Part 5: Just go out and kill!".

They said:

It is also funny to note that both Noah and Abraham were mentioned as righteous before "god" revealed himself to them...so this righteousness preceded god visiting them and making himself known...that destroys the argument that knowing right and wrong are impossible without god, also god himself did not want Adam and Eve to know what right and wrong were, so he is clearly anti morality..

I like that way of thinking (even if not the punctuation). 

God doesn't seem entirely consistent in his approach.

I expect that there will be religious apologists who disagree.

Everyone is searching . . .

I run Google Analytics on the Something Surprising blog and it tells me a bit about how my visitors found me.  Strangely enough, I even believe some of it (although not quite all).  It is more like a weather vane than a weather forecast, but a great service, and free, and informative.

Sometimes it is entertaining to see what search terms had been used in Google to get to Something Surprising.  Here are a few of them.

First - some slightly surprising ones - but bear in mind that I specialise in surprising things, so it should not be too surprising:

• what is the motto of the french navy? -- I gave a humorous answer here
• quite a night at the erawan -- Yes, I really covered that too
• smell the rectum of a whale in the most expensive of perfumes -- and this one
• bin laden homeopathy -- Yes, this one too.
• was william lane craig ever defeated? -- Oh yes!  Definitely!  But he would never admit it.
• lake with hole in the middle - here, and, frankly, quite a scary picture
• absurd irrational things -- Hmmm.  I generally prefer rational.  But . . . speaking of absurd and irrational

Some of the search terms are indeed absurd and irrational, and you might wonder how anyone could put all these words together in any single place:

• apollo 18 rock spiders
• dinosaur and unicorn receive a text message
• devonian hogmanay
• how can i convince myself that homeopathy works -- Hint:  It doesn't.

Some of them are theistic or simply naive (and ignorant)

• do unbelievers know right from wrong? -- How many guesses do you think you might need?
• can you convert an atheist -- Into what?
• are Christians on to something -- Yes, nearly their third millennium of waiting for the second coming.
• real reason dinosaurs became extinct noah arc -- No I think there was a different reason.
• why did god create science -- Perhaps so that it could confuse the believers?
• what do unbelievers see -- Erm?  Which way are they looking?

A few of them are more like statements of opinion than search terms:

• "jesus fish eating darwin fish" with the flying spaghetti monster in turn attacking the "jesus fish".
• muhammad is a narcissist, a pedophile, a mass murderer, a terrorist, a misogynist, a lecher, a cult leader, a madman a rapist, a torturer, an assassin and a looter." former muslim ali sina offered $50,000 to anyone who could prove otherwise based on islamic texts. the reward has gone unclaimed -- Who could possibly disagree?

And a few are slightly disappointing - I try not to be demotivational but have obviously failed.

• demotivational pictures natural beauty
• demotivational woman strong independant until things get a little bit di
• offensive jesus demotivational

But I just loved these

• why astrological predictions fail at times -- As if they succeed at other times?
• flat world ocean elephants turtles
• giant texas sinkhole keeps growing
• goldilocks and the three bears learning outcome
• how to make a fake fish tank
• have the russians been on the moon -- What? All of them?
  
• impossible discoveries
• uses of unstable isotopes: peaceful uses
• zombie compound fortification -- I think I can be sure I never touched on this topic

What fun!

Kangaroos - the final evidence against Noah?

Concluding the mini-series on the myth of the flood . . .  

Taking the bible literally - as we all do of course - the kangaroos must have been rescued by Noah.

That's a bit unfortunate for Noah really, because as evidence goes, they seem to be a final nail in his coffin.  They are such a dead-giveaway that the whole story can't be true. Creationists jump through so many hoops to find explanations that it is quite amusing (and yet strangely unsettling at the same time).

Aside from the difficulty that Noah would have had collecting them (as I think there is little to suggest that they were originally indigenous to the Middle East), when he released them they seem to have found their way back to Australia and nowhere else on earth. 

You might argue that the original two roos managed to get there and had their offspring when they arrived, but I don't think this idea hangs together.  How long does it take a pair of animals to get half way round the world on foot?  Presumably reproduction was also quite a high priority for them, as they only had one lifetime to start off a new species and didn't have time to waste.  They must have started making babies as soon as they could.  Then we seem to have to assume that no baby kangaroos got lost along the way to Australia, which seems a little unlikely.

There are, of course, similar instances of other unique and distinctive animals in remote parts of the world, but the kangaroos seem to be as good an example as any.  Some creationists would have you believe that they floated there on rafts of vegetation (which god neglects to mention in the bible).  Others claim that the continents only moved apart after the flood.

This picture seems to be an example of two possible explanations of kangaroo migration.  Both appear to be equally deluded.  Haven't the continents moved fast?  And yet they have now nearly slowed to a standstill!

Do we have a better explanation?  Yes certainly!  The fact of evolution explains how all the species spread and developed, how convergence ensures that predators tend to have similar features all over the world, herbivores have other common features (different from the predators) etc.  We don't need to have incredible tales of single pairs of animals surviving on rafts of floating vegetation for long enough to get from continent to continent.

This is the last post (for now) in the series exploring ideas around the myth of Noah and the flood.  I could go on - but you would probably beg me to stop now if you had the chance.  When I originally mooted the idea of such a series to some friends they seemed surprised that there was so much to say on the topic.

Back to some other topics now, but I can't leave the topic of Noah without a brief mention of rainbows.  These might not be god's promise not to send another flood, but they are fascinating things in themselves.  Some time soon I will write a post on some interesting aspects of the physics of rainbows - I'll try not to reproduce the basics but concentrate on the fun aspects.  (Thanks to this site for the photo above - which demonstrates several features that help me to spot that it is almost certainly not a fake.)

Related posts:
Noah - invented to scare the kids
Was the flood the only way?
2 by 2 - but not only 2 of each
Where is all Noah's water now?
Was the Ark big enough?Evidence in the geology - cliffs and varves
Noah's aquaria?
Noah in Islam
Rafts of Baramins
Before Noah came Gilgamesh

Before Noah came Gilgamesh

Continuing the mini-series on the myth of the flood . . . 

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest written stories, and it predates the Old Testament significantly.  Gilgamesh was almost certainly a real man, King of Uruk in about 2500BC.  He is said to have been buried in a surprising place, under the bed of the River Euphrates, which was temporarily diverted for the purpose.

In this short and quite charming tale, (find a copy of the full text here) you find all the ingredients of a great story.  It  includes themes that (oddly?) are also to be found in the bible.  Gilgamesh gets to fight almost invincible creatures, outsmarts his enemies, make alliances with unlikely characters, conducts heroic quests, searches for eternal life, finds it and then loses it to a cunning serpent.

If you wonder how Lord of the Rings was inspired I suspect that you will find some ideas here.  Tolkein must have been aware of Gilgamesh and he took some aspects of a nice short story and turned them into a seemingly interminable work of literature.  (You might notice that I am not exactly a fan of Tolkein - sorry!)

But the main reason why I mention Gilgamesh today is the account of the flood.  Just before revealing the secret of eternal life to Gilgamesh, the man-become-god Utnapishtim tells him the story of the flood, and how it had been sent by the gods because they could no longer stand the clamour from all the people in the world.  One of these gods, Ea, came to the rescue and tipped Utnapishtim off (in the usual way in a dream) that the waters were coming.  (Does this sound familiar?)  Utnapishtim had just enough time to make a boat - surprisingly a square boat with an area of about one acre.  He says:

I loaded into her all that I had of gold and of living things, my family, my kin, the beast of the field both wild and tame, and all the craftsmen. I sent them on board . . . entered the boat and battened her down.

And after only 7 days of rain, the rest of creation had been destroyed and a little while later the boat ran aground on a convenient mountain top and stayed there.  Utnapishtim then went through the routine of sending out a dove, (which came back) followed by a swallow (which also returned) and then a raven.  When the raven didn't return he knew it was safe to abandon ship.

So much of this story sounds familiar doesn't it.  This is another example of why the Old Testament really mustn't be taken too literally.   The story of the flood is just one of those truly ancient myths handed down through the generations, and like all good stories it was too good to waste.  Rather than bother with the real origins of the myth the whole thing gets attributed to Yahweh.  After all, who was going to complain about breach of copyright?

Those who have been following Something Surprising for a little while might remember two other similar situations that I have described.  Ancient stories seem to have a habit of getting incorporated into newer holy texts..
Here are links to them anyway:
A family of Old Testament gods?
Historical Jesus?

Coming very soon:  Kangaroos - the final evidence against Noah?

Small (and condescending) note: Feel free to leave your comments so that others can join in and make fun of them.  I'm pretty sure that I will get messages telling me that I don't understand the culture of the region at the time of the Old Testament, and that just because this story is older than the Old Testament it doesn't mean that the Old Testament is not true. 

Rafts of Baramins

Continuing the mini-series on the myth of the flood . . . 

First of all, what is a 'baramin'?  According to some creationists, the baramins are the 'created kinds' of animal that were on the ark.  The study of the taxonomy of these 'kinds of creatures is called baraminology, and people really waste their lives trying to demonstrated that this is a better explanation of the world of living things than evolution.

From the 'kinds' that were released after the flood, all the other species apparently evolved rather rapidly into the animals that share the world with us today.

Watching Revelation TV last weekend (which I sometimes do as a for a laugh - or possibly demonstrating a slightly masochistic tendency) I heard an American gentleman earnestly explaining that the dinosaurs actually were taken onto the ark and that he could prove it.

He explained that although nearly 600 species of dinosaur have already been identified and named, there were actually only 58 'kinds' of dinosaur and that the others were formed from them (during the last few thousand years, just before they became extinct of course).  Also there was plenty of room for them on the ark as Noah was careful to select juveniles which were only half a metre to one metre long.  (It was one of the best laughs I have had for a while.)

Creationists have a theory to explain how the animals got to all the continents of the world after the flood.  Rather than simply inferring that the flood was relatively localised, they postulate the idea of rafts of floating vegetation, left over from the devastation of the flood.  Apparently animals managed to survive for months as the cross the oceans to colonise distant parts of the world.  As they were travelling, the carnivores managed not to eat the others, and apparently none of them got thirsty.

Sigh - what people believe!

Not many more posts to go, on the topic of the flood.  Tomorrow I will muse on the distribution of the animals to the far 'corners' of the earth and then mention a story even more ancient than that of Noah.

Noah in Islam

Continuing the mini-series on the myth of the flood . . . 

Most of my readers will not be surprised to hear that Noah (or Nuh) is regarded as a prophet of Islam and there is a whole chapter in the qu'ran about him. 

Naturally the qu'ran disagrees with the bible on many important details.  For one thing the flood didn't inundate the whole world at all in the muslim version of the story, but only the region where Noah and his people lived.  Secondly, because there were no trees in the area Noah had to plant them and wait for them to grow, then using the timber to build the ark.

The local nature of the flood relieved Noah of a lot of responsibility so he only had to rescue the animals that were already in his care.  That also solves the problems of the spread of animals around the world after the flood, and indeed the difficulty of housing all the animals in the world for a year.  He was also permitted to save 76 other people who had submitted to god, but one of his sons perished.

It is not often that you will hear me supporting islam, but on this occasion, (choosing between two impossible stories about the same bronze age myth) it appears to me that the qu'ranic version is the less ridiculous in most ways!

Noah's aquaria?

Continuing the mini-series on the myth of the flood . . . 

Did Noah rescue the fish?

This might seem like a silly question.  Fish can swim can't they?  Why would they be affected by the flood?

Very few fish can survive in both fresh water and salt water.  Salmon and sea trout are examples of the minority that can tolerate a variety of conditions.  But put a shark in a lake and it will die.  Put a pike in the sea and it will not last long either.

The question is, 'was the flood water salty or not'?  Obviously if all the water came from rain it was pure and and 'fresh'.  At least it would have diluted the saltiness of the sea.  Possibly (in this ridiculous thought experiment) all the water ended up 'brackish' and therefore not suiting either the fish of the seas or of the rivers and lakes.


So in the best case Noah should have rescued either the fish that like salt water or those that like fresh water.  In the case of brackishness he should have rescued both, storing them in some absurd aquaria inside the ark to protect them from the water outside.

As an aside, speaking of ridiculous aquaria . . .

Back to Noah . . .

Maybe Islam is right after all.  It would solve the problem if, as taught  by Islamic scholars, fresh water and salt water do not mix.  Then the fish could choose to stay in water of the type that suited them.  More on Islam in the next post of the series.

Evidence in the geology - cliffs and varves

Continuing the mini-series on the myth of the flood . . . 

Geologists have search in vain throughout the centuries for evidence of the flood and so far not only have they drawn a blank but they have also found strong evidence against the idea of a single great world-wide flood just a few thousand years ago.

Creationists argue against the science to try to explain these findings in a way that supports their ridiculous story of the literal truth of the Old Testament, but the more they say the more it is obvious that they are clutching at straws.

To paraphrase what a creationist (a nice creationist) told me recently, layered rocks containing fossils can't be 'evidence' of evolution!  They can't be what they seem to be - millions of annual layers - that would make the world look very old!  
Just a minute . . . it actually is very old (at least compared with what the bible says).

Let's take the evidence of the Green River varves as an example.  Wikipedia says:

The Green River Formation is an Eocene geologic formation that records the sedimentation in a group of intermountain lakes. The sediments are deposited in very fine layers, a dark layer during the growing season and a light-hue inorganic layer in winter. Each pair of layers is called a varve and represents one year. The sediments of the Green River Formation present a continuous record of six million years. The mean thickness of a varve here is 0.18 mm, with a minimum thickness of 0.014 mm and maximum of 9.8 mm.  

England's famous White Cliffs of Dover also represent evidence of a sedimentary structure formed over a period of about 40 million years.   They represent the edge of a 400m thick layer of chalk which stretches across the British Isles to the Antrim coast in Northern Ireland.

Creationists oppose both of these examples, partly on the basis that they prove that the world is over 6000 years old.  

In the former case they suggest that the layers might have been created by individual waves, so instead of representing millions of years of annual cycles they were formed much more quickly.  (Naturally we see structures like this forming all around us all the time don't we?)  In the latter case they say that all this calcium (agreed to be the leftover bony structures from tiny creatures) was the result of a series of 'blooms' of plankton.  I even saw one treatise on the topic claim that it 'only' needed a 500m thick layer of plankton in the sea to produce such a deposit.  (I think that was the whole of the oceans, and somehow the deposits swirled around and landed at Dover.)  They even had an implausible excuse to explain why it was not relevant that the life-forms in the top few metres would completely block out the light from the layers underneath.  Let's just say that I didn't find it convincing.

Was the Ark big enough?

Continuing the mini-series on the myth of the flood . . . 

There was news earlier this year that a Dutch man, Johann Huibers, had arranged for a full-sized replica of the ark to be built.  He wanted to put it on a barge and moor it on the River Thames in London close to the sites that will be used for the Olympic games in 2012.  Apparently the dimensions that he took represented the largest of the several interpretations of the size of the cubit, as nobody is quite sure how big a cubit really was.

The first thing that comes to mind is that if his replica can't float on its own (as it is built on a pontoon) then it is possible that such a vessel would be considered a bit risky as the repository of all the future life on earth.  If the new ark can't make it to London on its own then it hardly deserves the space that might yet be allocated to it.

How big would it need to be anyway?

Quoting again from some tweets from @RosaRubicondior:

Noah's Ark would have needed space and food for 9-10,000 mammals ranging from elephants to pygmy shrews.

Noah's Ark would have needed space and food for 1 million beetles, most of which are predators.

Noah's Ark would have needed space and food for 18-20,000 birds ranging from ostriches to humming birds.

I wonder whether Rosa had made a serious study of the pseudo-science of baraminology before using these numbers.  (More on that in a few days time.)  Whether or not these numbers are actually true and however large the vessel, it seems inconceivable that Noah and his family would be able to:

• find all these animals and catch them
• collect the specialised food for the creatures (some of which would naturally eat each other)
• feed them and clean out their stalls for 10 months
• release them in the right order so that they did not eat each other (and anyway what did the carnivores eat immediately after the flood)

On top of that, it is now well known - and apparently not revealed by god at the time of Noah - that a single pair of any species is not enough to preserve a species.  Much more genetic diversity is required to overcome problems of in-breeding in a small population.

Let's face it.  Taking this story as the literal truth is a non-starter if you actually think about it rationally.  It is even quite difficult to see the place of this story if you take it figuratively.

Where is all Noah's water now?

Continuing the mini-series on the myth of the flood . . .

Since they knew nothing at all about science, didn't realise that the world was not flat, didn't have a concept of basic ideas like conservation of mass, why would anyone question where all the water came from and where it went to. Remember that at the time of Noah the wheel hadn't even been invented!  Something so trivial in the modern world would have seemed like a miracle to the wisest people of the time.

If you know no science and can't explain things rationally you just make a story and the great 'ju ju' in the sky makes things happen miraculously.  Your deity actually become more powerful if he has to do these things that nobody can explain. 

There is no point in me calculating the volume of water needed to flood the earth to a depth greater than the tops of the highest mountains, but it is clear that it wasn't there on earth just waiting to be rained down.  Its not even physically possible that god had stored up a 'mountain' of water somewhere (temporarily suspending the law of gravity until he needed it). 

Some speculate in desperation to find a 'rational' explanation.  Using knowledge that the world is not flat - knowledge that the ancients did not have - they suggest that a sphere of water was somehow suspended in orbit around the earth.  They claim that god made it rain down. There are some obvious physical flaws to this hypothesis.  For a start, orbital mechanics would make it difficult to describe how the water was kept up there.  There is no way that the water could have been stable in a spherical shape as any net rotation would stretch it out into a disc like Saturn's rings.  And nobody seems to have reported that you could see this water, or that the stars were obscured by the pre-flood water.  After all, the clouds are pretty good at hiding the stars from anyone on the ground and they clearly don't contain enough water at any one time for such a flood.  Aside from that, water in the vacuum of space would freeze into ice.  Nobody suggests that the flood was caused by snow, or that it got more than usually chilly while Noah was on his voyage.

Furthermore, where did the water all go after the flood?  It didn't just run off the edge of the flat world.  It is not hidden away under the earth's surface.  It hasn't gone back up into orbit either.  I think we would have noticed.  You can only invoke 'special pleading' again as an explanation.  God just took it away.

Let's face it - the flood was not possible on these grounds alone, unless (as I mentioned in an earlier post) it described a local inundation of water which appeared to wipe out the 'known' world of ancient times.  This explanation might be rational and reasonable if there happened to be any evidence for it. 

The creation of the Black Sea is one such possibility.  If the sea water broke through from the Mediterranean through the Bosporus then of course the level of water in the Black Sea could have risen quite suddenly.  (But of course this hypothesis is open to different interpretations.)  Indeed evidence may have been discovered off the Turkish coast for pre-flood civilisations and a flooded coastline as much as 100m under the current surface level.  Some claim that there has been a repeated cycle of flow backwards and forwards through the Bosporus throughout history, but that this particular change can be dated to around 6000 BCE.

However, if this Black Sea Hypothesis is adopted as an explanation for the flood, why did the bible not describe is as a wall or water, or as the waters suddenly rising?  Why go to all the drama of 150 days of rain?  It god couldn't tell the difference between these when he revealed the story then he's not much of a god.


I will leave you with one further thought from my online friend @RosaRubicondior who tweeted:

"How did the olive tree survive under salt water and how was it growing on top of a mountain?"

2 by 2 - but not only 2 of each

Continuing the mini-series on the myth of the flood . . . 

The animals went in two by two.  We all know that from our childhood songs and rhymes.  But did they?

Last year I was at a village quiz evening, and one of the questions was

"How many animals of each type did Moses take onto the ark?"

Its a good trick question - and the old ones really are the best.  Try it out on some people you know and see how many fail to notice that Moses wasn't actually involved.  But after the end of the quiz I was chatting with the vicar and I speculated that even if the question had been about Noah instead of Moses most people would not have got the answer right.  He looked puzzled and asked what I meant. 

So I referred him to the story in Genesis - a story that we all think we know very well.  But when you read it again it suggests rather strongly (in its internal string of inconsistencies) that the 'ritually unclean' animals should be gathered in pairs, but that seven pairs of the 'ritually clean' should be saved.

Noah quickly sacrificed some of them after the end of the flood, so I suppose he needed a few spares to keep him going for a while.

So that leaves me some questions.  Were the dinosaurs ritually clean or not?  What about unicorns?

Was the flood the only way?

Continuing the mini-series on the myth of the flood . . . 

Omnipotent god created the world in 6 days, and being omniscient he knew exactly how things would pan out for his creation.  In spite of that, he gave Adam and Eve free-will and thus gave them the impression that they could only blame themselves for the terrible things that happened in the world.  Since in those times even the wisest people on earth knew less about science than an average primary school child knows today they had no option but to invent stories of creator gods and as the stories were told time and time again they became more powerful.  How did they know that the stories were true?  They just did.  Everyone knew it. 

Let's assume for a moment that there was really a god behind the creation (even though the logic does not support the idea if you think about it carefully, as somehow the creator must have been created).  This all-powerful creator of the world somehow made an error in his plans and humanity lost its way and started worshiping other (even more false) gods.  (See this previous mini-series, A family of Old Testament gods? for other thoughts on that).  People forgot to be subservient to the god who had revealed to them that he had made them.  They got worse and worse and the creator did nothing to nip things in the bud, even though clearly he could have found a way to create a few natural disasters to frighten them back onto the right track.

No - foresight having failed him - this loving creator eventually could see no other way out of the problem than to wipe out most of creation and start again.  Presumably, having put a lot of effort into creating the world he did not want to start again with the whole day and night business, and he skipped the creation of the land and the seas.  I suppose they were good enough to recycle, whereas (Jesus not having been invented yet) the redemption of humanity was beyond the imagination.

On the other hand you could speculate that this loving god actually intended things to happen this way.

Or thirdly - maybe there wasn't a loving god at all and the flood myths are just a vestige of a local disaster which wiped out a few villages or perhaps a city somewhere near the home of the originator of the story, and you know how stories get amplified and exaggerations creep in over the weeks, months, years and ages.  (Incidentally this idea of a localised deluge is more in tune with the version of the story in the qu'ran, and indeed of the Epic of Gilgamesh.  More on those later.)

So assuming that there is some truth in the flood myths, the conclusions can only be that

• god was not there;
• god was careless enough to allow things to get to a state where he needed to send a flood; 
• god deliberately and malevolently set things up so that it was inevitable that he would destroy most of mankind.  

Whichever way you look at it, there can only be one reason to consider worshiping this monstrous deity who made the flood happen - and that is that you are frightened that he will do something like this again

I will leave you with one further thought from my online friend @RosaRubicondior who tweeted:

"If we're all descended from Noah, what are the odds that only one group of descendants remembered the Ark, the flood & Noah's name?"

Noah - invented to scare the kids?

This is the first in a mini-series looking at the story of Noah in the Old Testament of the bible and the qu'ran.  Anyone growing up in an area dominated by one of the Abrahamic religions can hardy have escaped learning this story as a young child.

How sweet, Noah built a big boat and carefully saved two of each kind of animal and looked after them until the flood subsided.  Our young minds did not stop to consider whether the story was true - or even whether it could have possibly been true.

But now, looking on with adult eyes, with less credulous eyes, and (coincidentally) with atheist eyes, I can write about a week's worth of somewhat surprising blog posts on the topic without becoming repetitive.

I'll start off with a brief look at why some children find the story frightening if they have been interested enough to think about the beginning of the story carefully.  I believe it was Marcus Brigstock who told the tale of a conversation with his young son.  When he gently introduced the idea that 'Daddy doesn't really believe in God' his son was horrified and frightened.  "But Daddy, you have to believe in god or he will send another flood to kill us all!"

A bright kid.  I don't know how old he is now, but I'm sure that even he might be surprised by some of the other thoughts about the myth of the flood, concentrating on the version about Noah, but straying into other mythology from Old Testament times and earlier.  There are so many questions to be asked about this story, about the omniscience of god, about the physics of the flood, and about evolution or creation since that time.

One of the consequences for me is that Genesis again appears to be plagiarised from earlier stories, casting doubt about whether any of the words of the bible were revealed by god.  The more you examine the stories of the bible the more you wonder whether there is a shred of truth that can be believed.  Only the logical fallacy of 'special pleading' enables you to choose parts that seem more believable than the others.

Check back every day for the next installment (although I will probably interleave other topics too).

And . . . in case you were worried like Brigstock junior . . . try to remember the rainbow that god sent as his promise not to do it again.  But did he really mean it?  Or did he have his fingers crossed behind his back while he was saying it?  The picture of the Rainbow Warrior sunk in a harbour in New Zealand seems strangely representative of the state of Noah's ark - sunk and hopeless after a legendary career.

Related posts:
Was the flood the only way?
2 by 2 - but not only 2 of each
Where is all Noah's water now?
Was the Ark big enough?Evidence in the geology - cliffs and varves
Noah's aquaria?
Noah in Islam
Rafts of Baramins
Before Noah came Gilgamesh
Kangaroos - the final evidence against Noah?

When was the flood?

In the calendar developed by Archbishop James Ussher (who calculated that the world was created in 4004 BC), Noah's flood happened in 2348 BCE.

By comparison, there are Bristlecone Pine trees alive today that are dated to be 500 years older than this.

Of course there are many ancient stories of 'the flood' from different cultures.  Some are almost certainly older than the Old Testament version. Which one should we believe in if we don't accept that the bible is the literal word of god?

But more importantly where did all the water come from and where is it now?  And how did the koalas and kangaroos get back from Australia to get on the ark?  Or maybe they weren't there in Australia originally, but why did the amazing rafts of floating vegetation take the koalas and kangaroos only to Australia after the flood and not leave their kind anywhere else along the way there.

How can anyone really believe in this as a rational literal story? The fact that some people do believe it only strengthens my disbelief.