78 Evolution and the Fossil Record
to find what they’re paid to find. Instead, like the Clark and Block quotes above demonstrate,
they have seen the complexity of real geology in hundreds of drill cores spanning whole
continents and don’t even begin to try to interpret these rocks in a creationist mold (even
though they may be devout Christians and believe much of the rest of the fundamentalists’
credo). If they tried, they’d find no oil and lose their jobs! As creationists keep trying to get
their bizarre notion of flood geology inserted into classrooms and places like the Grand
Canyon, we have to ask ourselves: Are we willing to give up the oil, gas, coal, groundwater,
and uranium that our civilization requires? That would be one of the steepest prices we
would pay if we listened to the creationists.
Ship of Foolishness?
Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger,
I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six
impossible things before breakfast.”
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-GlassMost creationists believe that the Noah’s ark story is historical fact. Never mind that there
are actually two different stories in Genesis 6 and 7 from different sources that don’t even
agree with one another, or that large parts of both flood myths are cribbed almost word for
word from the much older accounts in the Epic of Gilgamesh (see chapter 2). Never mind
that creationists must explain why one verse has seven pairs of clean animals on the ark,
while another only has one pair. Creationist books are full of incredible mental gyrations
needed to make the Noah’s ark story remotely believable. However, as I found out from
my encounter with Gish, creationists will avoid discussing these points if they are brought
up in debate, because they sound foolish and ruin the creationists’ credibility with most
audiences. A number of expeditions have been sent to Mount Ararat in Turkey (the sup-
posed landing site) and made fantastic claims that they have found evidence of the ark,
but none of these have stood up to scrutiny, despite the claims made by some creationist
books and TV shows.
First, let us start with what the Bible says and delve into the world of arkeology.
McGowan (1984: chap. 5) and Moore (1983) discuss the logistical details of the Noah’s ark
story at length, so I will not repeat their entire analysis here. A whole series of questions and
problems come up when you look at the ark story in detail. The biggest problem is that a
wooden boat the size of the ark would break up under the smallest stresses. This is a well-
known problem in nautical engineering. Beyond a certain size, wooden vessels are simply
not strong enough or flexible enough and begin to rip apart or leak catastrophically. The
strength of wood as a vessel increases in size is not enough to hold the vessel rigid and intact.
If Noah’s ark were indeed 137 meters (450 feet) long, as in most estimates, it would be larger
than any wooden ship that has ever been built in history. The sailing ship Wyoming was
100 meters (329 feet) long, leaked constantly due to the problems with the flexing of the
hull, and sank 14 years after its launch in 1910. So did the 99 meter (324 foot) barge Santiago,
which sank in 1918. Two wooden British warships, the HMS Orlando and HMS Mersey, were