The Fossil Record 79102 meters (335 feet) long, but were scrapped only a few years after they were built
because they were not seaworthy. Yet Noah’s ark was allegedly about 30 percent larger than
these boats that could not stay afloat and intact, despite the most advanced technology of
wooden shipbuilding ever devised. Creationists sometimes mention legendary Chinese trea-
sure ships of the fifteenth century that may have approached 137 meters, but if they were real
and actually this big, they were just barges that barely moved, and none of them are known
to have floated outside quiet harbors and rivers.
McGowan (1984:55) calculates that the biblical dimensions give a boat with about 55,000
cubic meters of internal volume. As we discussed earlier, there are at least 1.5 million species
on earth today, which gives us only about 0.0367 cubic meters per species, or about one-third
the capacity of a domestic oven—and these animals would have to be packed like shoeboxes
stacked on top of one another to make this solution work. Clearly this is not enough space
for most large animals. The pairs (or is it seven pairs?) of elephants, rhinos, and hippos
would take up much of the ark all by themselves. The problem gets even more complicated
if we consider that the true estimate is about 4 or 5 million species on earth.
The creationists, of course, are aware of this problem. When the flood myths were writ-
ten, most ancient Middle Eastern cultures recognized only a handful of animals (domesti-
cated plus wild). They paid no attention to insects, different kinds of fish, or many other less
conspicuous forms of life, so they saw no problem in accounting for all living things that
were important to them in a single boat. But the modern-day creationists must account for all
of the millions of life forms on earth or else admit that some things have evolved from others
since the days of Noah. They do this by claiming that Noah only took the “created kinds”
(their translation of baramin in Hebrew) on the boat and that these kinds have since evolved
into many more forms (a concession that evolution occurs!). By this method, they claim that
there were only about 30,000 to 50,000 created kinds on board, but then that only gives each
“kind” about a cubic meter to live in—still not much of an improvement.
Let’s look closer at the term baramin. It was created out of nothing by Seventh-Day
Adventist Frank Marsh in 1941 by tacking two words together from a Hebrew glossary (bara,
“created”; min, “kind”) without any idea how Hebrew actually works. Since almost none
of the creationists read the Old Testament in the original Hebrew (or they would spot the
problems and inconsistencies that make literal interpretation absurd), they don’t realize how
ridiculous this term is, and why it doesn’t mean what they think it means. As I learned when
I studied Hebrew, the Semitic root “b-r-a” (vowel points were not invented until centuries
later) is translated “he created” or “he conjured,” so it is a past-tense verb, not a past parti-
ciple of a verb, as Marsh used it. And min can be used to mean not only a “kind” but also a
species, or even a sex. Slapped together in Marsh’s construction, the object min replaces the
original subject Elohim (one of the names for the gods), so literally translated, baramin means
“the species created,” not “god created”—and certainly not “created kinds” in any sense the
scriptures use. If Marsh had known any Hebrew and wanted to create a grammatically cor-
rect translation of “created kind,” it would have been min baru (past participle). But given
the consistently incompetent scholarship of creationists, I would never expect them to get
this part right.
Leaving aside their ignorance of Hebrew, the whole topic of “baraminology” reminds
one of a laughably poor imitation of science—science as imagined by kids at play or ama-
teurs who are parroting the forms without understanding any of the principles or protocols
or implications of the actual research, or the silly imitation of science in the movies and TV,