So … the Dutch have their crazy Bible nuts, too

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What else can you say to this story of a Dutch creationist building a model of Noah's ark? The story is titled "New Noah's Ark ready to sail", but I rather doubt that this goofball project in deranged carpentry is capable of going to sea at all, even though it is only one fifth the size of the silly boat described in the Bible; it's actually evidence against the accuracy of the old fable, since it should demonstrate the lack of seaworthiness of the ark.

Also, they're going to fill it with models of animals. No word if they're also going to stock it with massive quantities of manure that need to be shoveled overboard every day.

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I've always wondered if following the Ark Recipe would result in a functional watercraft. Interesting that somebody is actually testing it out, particularly given the consequences of failure. Somehow, I don't think they will get nearly as far as Heyerdahl did.

If I rememer the story of this goof correctly, the "Ark" is built on a steel hull. There is no plan for actually sailing it, except to tow it to some place where it will be easier to get the credulous on board so they can be separated from a few euros.

"No word if they're also going to stock it with massive quantities of manure that need to be shoveled overboard every day."

Come on PZ, don't you know that the manure on the original Ark was processed into essential nutrients that were then used in the hydroponic hanging gardens to grow soy beans as food for all the animals, it was also used to make soy burgers for all carnivores.

By Fernando Magyar (not verified) on 28 Apr 2007 #permalink

Some time ago there were even dutch politicians flirting with ID and that's just uncomfortably close to 'here' (Belgium), but even here creationism is alive, i'm combining my master in biology with a program to become a biology teacher and we've already been warned about the rising number of students that just don't believe in evolution, be it christians or muslims.
Luckily reading Pharyngula is a big help in preparing me to spread reasonable arguments.
Great blog!

Umm, that's the soy beans, and not the manure, that was used to make soy burgers. Have to be clear when it comes to such an important subject as this.

By Fernando Magyar (not verified) on 28 Apr 2007 #permalink

No word if they're also going to stock it with massive quantities of manure that need to be shoveled overboard every day.

I understand they actually have a surplus of that stuff.

Google for measurements of the ark and you'll learn that the boat would NOT have been seaworthy with materials available thousands of years ago. The wood would not be strong enough.

Of course, if this came to the attention of the general public, the response would be either

A) God's waterproof seal

B) The measurements are wrong

By FishyFred (not verified) on 28 Apr 2007 #permalink

Actually, I think it has been shown that a wooden boat the size of the ark is not possible. The largest wooden boats were the 18th century ships of the line all of which had a standard displacement of less then 4000 tons.

I thought so. Here's a story from last year that reports on the steel hull. Amusingly, the goof said this at the time:

And just think, Noah did it alone and without modern tools. It's unimaginable, no?

At least he got one thing right.

Not often you get to see the phrase "deranged carpentry".

The story was that it rained for forty days and forty nights. To the ancients, that was, like, y'know, like almost forever, man.

And then the waters came up. (Obviously the ancients' version of Hollywood writers made a lot of wrong guesses about the mechanics of rainfall and flooding, but being desert people, they knew a distant storm might be followed some time later by a flash flood, so it was just simple imagination that allowed them to scale up local weather phenomena to global phenomena.)

The actual time the ark was afloat -- with the animals and crew, fresh water and stored food -- was over a year. Factor that into the food storage planning.

If enough fresh water did get added to the Earth to cause all the mountains to be covered, then the ocean would, for over a year, have been bracking water rather than salt water. Forget the land animals, what about the fresh water and salt water aquaria needed -- and the stored food to feed the fishes -- to keep alive all species of fish (and shellfish, crustaceans, and so on)?

By OldScratch (not verified) on 28 Apr 2007 #permalink

There's one in Florenceville NB Canada too, built ;by some cult as I recall.

By Weldon MacDonald (not verified) on 28 Apr 2007 #permalink

What a waste of good cedar. Here's some more photos showing the commercial barge it's sitting on, and some other fun features like insulation and a glassed-in upper deck. Well, the weather up there isn't as clement as Noah had, I guess:

http://www.arkvannoach.com/themakingof.htm

The steel barge is hilarious. It would have been much more interesting (in a morbid naval architecture disaster sense), if he had tried to float the thing.

By Foldedpath (not verified) on 28 Apr 2007 #permalink

If the water levels reached the height depicted in the Bible, covering every mountain for example, the resultant effect on Noahs air conditioning would have been somewhat severe. He would have had to contend with temperatures of approximately 400 degrees centigrade and bone crushing air pressure. Not exactly the ideal conditions if you intend to lock yourself in a confined space with a couple of undoubtably grumpy Tyrannasaurus rex.

Com'on guys, what are you trying to do here? All those problems you cite here (i.e. the unseaworthiness of the Ark, manure, etc) could all have been easily overcome by divine intervention! So, if God wanted the Ark to float, it would. If he wanted the animals not to eat for 40 days, they wouldn't, and so forth!

What's your problem? You try to inject rationalism into the supernatural? Once you accept "everything is possible through & by God," the rest is by-the-way!

YOu should try to converse with the believers and get their perspective. They have an answer for all your questions!

Google for measurements of the ark and you'll learn that the boat would NOT have been seaworthy with materials available thousands of years ago. The wood would not be strong enough.

Of course, if this came to the attention of the general public, the response would be either

A) God's waterproof seal

B) The measurements are wrong

C) "Poof." No need for seals or measurements or anything like that. Just "poof."

That already must be their explanation for how all of those animals stayed alive for that long. What other explanation for that could there be other than "poof"? One has to wonder why they even needed an ark in the first place when everything could have just been "poofed."

Remember, we're talking about people who think that the greatest intelligence in the universe divided the whole animal kingdom up into the clean animals and the unclean "cootie bug" animals. You might want to cut them a little slack.

Com'on guys, what are you trying to do here? All those problems you cite here (i.e. the unseaworthiness of the Ark, manure, etc) could all have been easily overcome by divine intervention!

Good point. The LORD already divinely intervented what with all that humongous amount of rain, so the LORD might as well go ahead and intervent with whatever else.

I descended from Dutch Bible nuts, of the Christian Reformed flavor. My sister calls them Dutch Southern Baptists--all the rules but none of the emotion.

did they use REAL gopher wood?

did they use REAL gopher wood?

No, but it's funny how all of the sudden a creationist apologist for a supernatural event like the flood turns into an apologist for how the ark could have worked purely by natural scientifical methods. That's hilarious.

did they use REAL gopher wood?

Wasn't that a mistranslation. What Noah really said to Ham, Shem, and Japheth was "Gofer wood, we need lotsa wood".

By natural cynic (not verified) on 28 Apr 2007 #permalink

I wonder if the captain will go down with his ship??

Say, that reminds me of something that's been nagging me for a while. Some creationist retards claim that The Flood was what caused all the bones in the fossil record to fall in the strata where they are (I know, I know, how ridiculous...) but if that's the case, why did Noah leave all the cuddly TRexes behind? That thing looks about big enough for a pair of Apatosaurs... It'd have been bad if the velociraptors got into the Hippo pen, for sure, for sure!

Hee hee hee, the faithful are such a bunch of morons! You gotta admit religion is terrific for its comedic value!

mjr.

NO platypii, echnidas or kangaroos on the ark, mate. Suggests to me that Noah must have had them beamed onto the ark via his "Star Trek" connections.

"Beam me up, Skippy."

It's allegedly 1/5 the dimensions in the Bible. So I say we go easy on him. Have him collect the 350,000 named species of beetle (using modern methods if he desires) and then sail around the world and redistribute them.

They already reproduced Noah's Ark in Missouri.

They tore it down? Over a year ago? I am so devastated. I'm from just east of there, and used to pass by it every time I drove to and from college. Haven't been back that way in a couple of years - I'll be so sad next time not to see it!!! That was always one of the trip milestones; at the ark, it was only 40 more minutes to home. I'm going to be so melancholy for the rest of the weekend.

...Well, at least it's not in Minnesota, so I don't have to deal with James Lileks waxing rhapsodic about its passing. :)

"did they use REAL gopher wood?"

Carl Spackler: Correct me if I'm wrong Sandy, but if I kill all the golfers, they're gonna lock me up and throw away the key ...
Sandy: Not golfers, you great fool! Gophers! The *little* *brown*, *furry* *rodents* -!
Carl Spackler: We can do that; we don't even have to have a reason. All right, let's do the same thing, but with gophers -!

And that has nothing to do with anything, but who can resist a good Caddyshack quote?

OEJ

By One Eyed Jack (not verified) on 28 Apr 2007 #permalink

If the Lord could make the boat seaworthy, then he really wouldn't have need to flood the freakin' planet. He could've sent some tee-totalin', blue-ballin' angels to exact God's wrath.

One thing I love about the Fantasia version of the Noachian flood story is the gaggle of crabs that pop up after the ark beaches. Shouldn't there have been only two?

I laughed until I cried when I saw this. Then, I sent the link to PZ.

There is no plan for actually sailing it, except to tow it to some place

It is enough if an ark floats, as many notes.

Presumably people noted sea sediments high up on land, and needed an explanation. Probably also people obsessed with a useless project ('touched by gods') needed to be explained, to be less threatening and peculiar.

The biggest 'poof' here is the global addition and removal of the water cover. Perhaps the abrahamic gods took a leak, and scooped up the the liquid afterwards?

Measurements show that plate tectonics catches some water, but not of religious proportions:

"I call it the Beijing anomaly. Water inside the rock goes down with the sinking slab and it's quite cold, but it heats up the deeper it goes, and the rock eventually becomes unstable and loses its water. The water then rises up into the overlying region, which becomes saturated with water.

"If you combine the volume of this anomaly with the fact that the rock can hold up to about 0.1 percent of water, that works out to be about an Arctic Ocean's worth of water."

http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=arti…

It is no surprise to most of us that christian texts really doesn't hold water. :-)

By Torbjörn Larsson (not verified) on 28 Apr 2007 #permalink

The most striking example of why our species, though maybe the smartest on Earth, is a cataclysmic intellectual failure is the "poof" phenomenon when it comes to the Ark and Bible literalists.

There are obviously so many ways in which that fable is beyond ludicrous and incoherent that it's difficult to pick just a dozen of them; but once you do, you could tie down a creationist to keep him from squirming and scream in his face,very loudly, that there is not enough for Chrissakes room in Manhattan, much less on a big-ass raft, for even one of "every animal," much less two or seven, and that the sheer fluid flux required for a global flood would be monkeyballs insane, and so on; and it does...not...matter. The Poofs! are flying at a gazillion terahertz at that point, and I think you could probably threaten to actually kill one of these folks if he refused to take you through the step-by-step process through which he believes any of this shit could be remotely plausible, and he'd still be going "Blah-de-blah-der-ba-dee-ber-yip-yip-yep-BORK-BORK-BORK!" like the Swedish fuckin' Chef even as you brought the hammer of nevermore crashing down on his face. Sheer haplessness secondary to flagrant brainwashing.

"If the water levels reached the height depicted in the Bible, covering every mountain for example, the resultant effect on Noahs air conditioning would have been somewhat severe."

I always wondered what it was like for Noah et al. to be bobbing around at 9000m above sea level. I assume they had room for O2 canisters. I bet Noah had a hematocrit of about 60 by the time that ordeal was done and I'm surprised he didn't stroke out from his blood turning more or less to yogurt, though he probably could have won the Tour de France at that point.

"If the water levels reached the height depicted in the Bible, covering every mountain for example, the resultant effect on Noahs air conditioning would have been somewhat severe."

You have to be shitting me!

"'The design is by my wife, Bianca,' Huibers said. 'She didn't really want me to do this at all, but she said if you're going to anyway, it should look like this.'"

That's right! She said, "I really don't want you to build a model of the Ark, but if you do, make sure it's fifteen times the size of our house!" True dat!

Good thing this guy's wife is saner than he is! WHEEEEEEEEEE!

What the heck is gopher wood?
Zat the kinda wood a woodchuck would chuck if he could?

Blimey! I must have been living under a rock because I never heard of it before reading about it here, and I live a 1 hour train journey from Schagen.
Man, does that boat look ugly.......

Oh yeah, the Dutch have their own Bible Belt too... and nowadays even a majority Christian government (including a bunch of ol' fashioned protestants opposing everything that's fun). That, and an increase in Islamic fundamentalism, and we have a recipe for a rabidly religious the Netherlands.
I'm ashamed that my home country is doing worse than the Catholic US city I live in.

Wasn't Noah 120 when he built the Ark?

By The quantum pancake (not verified) on 28 Apr 2007 #permalink

They've got a "accurate 1/4 scale replica of Noah's Ark" a few klicks up the road from me. How the hell can they know it's "accurate"? Even the Bible is a bit vague on details beyond the principal dimensions of the (non-existent) boat. Totally dry-land of course. If they had any real faith, they'd try to take it down the Ottawa River rapids near there ;-).

The website seems to soft-peddle the religious angle a bit. As I recall, there was a bit of a scandal at the time the resort was built -- I forget the details, but something shady in the way they pre-sold the time-shares; several investors lost a chunk of money and a couple of the promoters (including a local minister) wound up being charged. This was slightly pre-Web, and I can't find any links about it.

Well, at least the Raelians have a more 'scientific' explanation.
Noah brought cell samples on board, & when dry land availed once more, he cloned them back into being.
Of course, they don't have an explanation of where all that water came from.
& of course, no proof except from 'on high'.

Divine inspiration has opened my eyes to the solution to the manure problem: they shoveled it overboard in such quantities that new continents formed, ending the Deluge. Hallelujah!

The crazy bible nuts thing is getting insane. I've had more Witnesses at the door in the past month than I have in my entire life.

"...this goofball project in deranged carpentry is capable of going to sea at all, even though it is only one fifth the size of the silly boat described in the Bible; it's actually evidence against the accuracy of the old fable, since it should demonstrate the lack of seaworthiness of the ark."

How the heck could a single family in the iron age have powered this thing? Sails? Oars? And what about steering it? To say nothing of the genetics - all recent animals descended from a pair of ancestors about three thousand years ago - what a genetic bottleneck!

The gumbies who believe this Creationist crap are seriously deranged.

By Richard Harris, FCD (not verified) on 28 Apr 2007 #permalink

Yeah our country isn't doing all that great these days. We have religious nutcases in the news, religious nutcases running our government, religious nutcases shooting and stabbing people on the streets. It aint pretty.

The only glimmer of hope is that our minister of education is a staunch atheist and a pretty damn smart fellow all around. He's the only member of the current csbinet I have any faith in at all. Pun intended.

I think reading Gilgamesh should be compulsory. It has the story of the great flood almost word-to-word, except that instead of Yahweh the flood was created by Enlil and other gods. People would understand where the Bible stories come from. Or not.

Cool story, anyway. Thousands of years old and still relevant.

By Dunkleosteus (not verified) on 29 Apr 2007 #permalink

I think reading Gilgamesh should be compulsory. It has the story of the great flood almost word-to-word, except that instead of Yahweh the flood was created by Enlil and other gods.

Ah, but Gilgamesh is just a heathen fable, whereas the story of Noah is true, 'cause the Bible tells us so! This is apparently an important distinction...

Waddaya say we let the fundamentalist types demonstrate their faith by building a full-scale ark and all cramming onto it for a little sea cruise? If it sinks, it must be the will of the Big Invisible Man in the Sky, yes? Anyone found treading water after it goes down clearly doesn't want to go to Heaven.

By Voice '0Reason (not verified) on 29 Apr 2007 #permalink

... they shoveled [ the manure ] overboard in such quantities that new continents formed ...

"So good they called it Ankh-Morpork" (with apologies to Terry Pratchett).

I live in one of the Catholic, Southern parts of the Netherlands. Down here, the Roman Catholic Church is taken about as seriously as the Church of England in the UK (i.e. more of a social club for senior citizens that gets together on Sunday mornings... if they're not too hung over.) Still, there's a strong anti-immigrant sentiment these days, and the religion element behind it cannot be overestimated. I've had otherwise educated, level-headed Dutch colleagues of mine tell me things like: "they're secretly planning on turning our country into an Islamic caliphate!", and more ominously, "They're breeding us out of existance!" When it comes to Allochtonen (people that are not considered sufficiently Dutch), they do make the distinction between the "good" ones (i.e. people of a Christian or post-Christian background), and the "bad" ones (i.e. Muslims.) Being an American, I'm considered "one of the good ones" -- I've been told this directly, in those precise words. For the "bad ones", they have special mandatory assimilation classes, designed to alienate and otherwise piss off the most marginalized segment in their population. It's strange: this little country, which otherwise appears to be so progressive and outward-looking, still harbors these viscious ideas.

By j.t.delaney (not verified) on 29 Apr 2007 #permalink

We have an ark very close to where I live too, except that it's part of a 'resort' .

I actually remember going there as a kid and don't particularly remember anything else being over-the-top Christian besides the ark though, and their apparent ban on all alcohol.

Sorry for the double post. My favourite part of the website for the resort I just linked is this:

Located at the
entrance to Logos Land Resort is an accurate 1/4 scale replica of Noah's Ark.

iirc from about 15 years ago, the inside of this 'accurate' model ark is a restaurant...

Thanks for that - I'd missed this story completely.

Yes, the Netherlands has its bible belt, running from the islands of Walcheren and Beveland in the south-west through the Veluwe in the centre, to Staphorst and Hardenberg in Overijssel. (Schagen isn't part of it though). Its members aren't generally as vocal as their American counterparts, but are still pretty weird.

The various bits of crankiness include prohibitions on television, vaccination and insurance. Funnily enough I can't find any of those mentioned in the bible.

A doctor was forced out of his job in Urk a few years ago because he believed in the wrong flavour of Christianity. Fundamentalist Urk has incidentally just about the worst teenage-drinking problem in the country. You can't make this stuff up.

Then there was the group who objected to a columnist in their newspaper and started taking it out on the boys who delivered it. More evidence that logic deprivation is rarely confined to a single area.

Then there is the small group that tries to make out that topless sunbathing (only on the part of women as far as I know) will cause irreparable damage to society.

Yes, you get some nutcases everywhere.

I for one am always puzzled by how big people say Noah's Ark was. A cubit is about the length of a forearm, or the length of a loop of rope wrapped elbow to thumb-base--which I estimate at about 18 inches (45 cm). I think the canonical length for Egyptian and Roman cubits is about 20.5 inches. So 150 cubits would be about 45 metres long--still too big for one fellow to build in less than years, but nowhere near the size we're seeing in these reconstructions. The biblical literalists are using a different cubit, something like "hip to outstretched fingertips." But even the first measurement would seem impossibly huge to the people back then. Recall that Sir Francis Drake's ship, the Golden Hind, was 53 feet long. That's 16 metres if I'm converting correctly.

Also, our image of the Ark used to be a curved, boat-like object until fundamentalists started worrying about fitting in all the animals of the world, when it became squared off to provide more volume. It would make more sense if Noah was collecting only the birds, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals of his local ecology--which I'm pretty sure was what the authors of this tale intended. Any culture that lives along a river tends to have a story about the grand-daddy of the usual floods--e.g. Gilgamesh's flood.

"Gopher wood" seems to be a transcription error, possibly for "cypress."

It'd have been bad if the velociraptors got into the Hippo pen, for sure, for sure!

The velociraptors got thrown off because they kept on opening doors and letting the rain in.

By Iain Walker (not verified) on 29 Apr 2007 #permalink

Jesus H. Christ!!!

That thing would leak like a sieve (or perhaps like an ark). The thing is built like a house, not a boat. The cedar boards were put on like siding on a house (with a nail gun!)

Not surprising, of course, since the guy is a carpenter who builds houses, not a boat-builder.

Of course, the guy will probably open a Bible theme park and rake in the dough from this. I suspect he is not as stupid as some people think.

Have any Christian fundamentalists proposed building a memorial to honor all of the victims of God's greatest genocide ever, The Flood, in which he sent all but a handful of people -- including the elderly, men, women, and of course children -- to a cold, watery, lung-filling, horrid grave?

Maybe they could have a new fake mini-ark on one side, and a sculpture with billions being drowned by a neurotic, weak God on the other.

I doubt this guy is really thinks this is proof of anything. Sure, he used cheap and light materials. Sure he built it really small. Sure he built it on a metal barge. Sure that thing wouldn't float even waterproofed and would be downright impossible to build and float if to scale. But, this guy is going to make his money back and then some fleecing the saps.

When I first heard about this project I laughed, the ark couldn't have been built with the materials they had at the time. So his great plan to recoup his money was certainly doomed. But, considering he's built the thing cutting corners and cheating... well he will make his money back and then some.

If I took up selling t-shirts with some image of Jesus taken from some amazing sheet stain for 500 bucks a pop to thousands of people would you folks really criticize me for selling pictures that look like urine soaked sheets that I claim looks like a mythological figure or would you do a little math and suddenly become my friend?

The biggest 'poof' here is the global addition and removal of the water cover. Perhaps the abrahamic gods took a leak, and scooped up the the liquid afterwards?

Measurements show that plate tectonics catches some water, but not of religious proportions...

Kent Hovind (as reported in Pooflingers Anonymous, under "The Hovind Files") said that what we just THINK are tectonic plates are actually the scars in the earth where "the waters came up" and then, apparently also drained down again later. Classic creationist woo.

I think he's also one of the guys who says that the dino fossils have their heads pulled back because they were trying to keep their nostrils above the water line.

Yes the Dutch ....

They've got all the different brands of ID-ots , creationist nut cases , ignoramuses and superstitious super- naturalists you can imagine ;

They have also highly esteemed "scientists " that actually are ID-ots like
prof dr . Cees Dekker
and of course
the usual "scientific and progressive creationists " if not some straight YEC's : to name just some
Prof dr Bruinsnma
Peter Scheele ( still present on the internet with his
degeneration site ? )

the infamous Dr Peter Borger ( known from iscid , EvC an his GutoB theory )a good friend of prof John .a. Davison
it seems ....

There are also some "evangelical" organisations ( one from the bible - high shool of amersfoort / prof dr ouweneel
Dr .zoutewelle )
creaton , and the ( belgian ) creabel ...

of course there is also the usual gang of theistic evolutionist ( especially Roman catholics en in Belgium , some well indoctrinated chaps like ( astronomer and physicist ) G. Bodifee )

But the worst is yet to come; Harun yaha's ifluence (on the muslim population of the netherlands) IS growing and spreading rapidly ....

Even here in ol' Europe the battle against obscurantism
and religious idiocy isn't done at all ....

the 350,000 named species of beetle

From when is this number? Thousands of insect species are described every year.

BTW, woodchucks can chuck wood, at a rate that has been measured and published in the Annals of Improbable Research.

By David Marjanović (not verified) on 29 Apr 2007 #permalink

Every time this Ark business bobs to the surface, I'm, inevitably reminded of Eddie Izzard's "Tyranny of Ducks" routine on his "Glorious" album.

If I took up selling t-shirts with some image of Jesus taken from some amazing sheet stain for 500 bucks a pop to thousands of people would you folks really criticize me for selling pictures that look like urine soaked sheets that I claim looks like a mythological figure or would you do a little math and suddenly become my friend?

I've done some math, but that hasn't made me any more likely to hang out with meth dealers than I was before I did that math. It isn't any different with you. Actually, if the profitability of something is your only consideration, why aren't you selling meth? Unless you are, in which case we can do a lot more damage to you than just pointing and laughing.

Anyway, If you started selling things like virgin mary toast, I'd do some more math so that I could let the IRS know that you're holding out on them (and you would be holding out on them, it's what con artists do). They tend to get a little bit pissed off about that, and then they send men with guns to your shitty amusement park.

If I took up selling t-shirts with some image of Jesus taken from some amazing sheet stain for 500 bucks a pop to thousands of people would you folks really criticize me for selling pictures that look like urine soaked sheets that I claim looks like a mythological figure or would you do a little math and suddenly become my friend?

not to proselytize, as I understand the point you're making, but taking advantage of the stupid and ignorant is what the likes of Dembski et. al. do.

easy enough to understand, but hardly a worthy endeavor;
regardless of the motivation, feeding ignorance for fun and profit only continues it.

so, no, I wouldn't be your friend because you made money fleecing the rubes. I understand it, but don't expect anyone to respect you for it.

I liked the line that says "biblical scholars debate exactly what the wood used by Noah would have been." Surely not REAL biblical scholars. Not today, anyway.

At least the flood story is interesting. Gods getting it on with human women, massive destruction, a nice bit with the dove and the rainbow at the end, then something weirdly sexual involving Ham and his dad.

Then there's the bit where God promises never again to destroy all life on earth. That will be done US, apparently.

By Eveningsun (not verified) on 29 Apr 2007 #permalink

"all life on earth. That will be done US, apparently."
Oh my god

An orthodox jew once told me that the answer to the strength of materials problem was that the ark was made of some magical substance called "gopher wood", whatever that is. I asked how it was hewn, if it was really stronger than steel ...

craig: the wood version of adamant, it seems.

Dunkleosteus: I have been told that Gilgamesh is a distorted version of "what really happened" and that the Bible records what really did. (Then of course you get the usual story about being unable to trust 'secular dating" or what not.)

I protest against including Hardenberg in the Bible belt: Hardenberg is somewhat heavy, but for real Bible belt you must mean Rijssen.
Actually, prof dr Cees Dekker is the only IDiot I've ever heard of who is a well known scientist in his field. I'm somewhat surprised the DI does not make much of him, as he actually spoke in 2005 at the ID conference in Prague ( http://idpluspeterswilliams.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_archive.html). But Dekker has been pushed to the wall pretty well; at the KNAW series of lectures in Amsterdam he even conceded that God might have used trial and error. His confederate Meester is now promoting Ruse.
Tsjok45, Bruinsma is long retired. Scheele, PeeBee: oh, shit. The real danger is the Evangelische Omroep. Why do you think all sensible people watch Canvas?
Anyway, blast and roast the social-democrats for not wanting the socialists in government; their only ONLY sensible thing was getting Ronald Plasterk education minister. I hope he'll remember to revise the biology standards. Evolution has only been mandatory since 1995 or 1996, when the Christian Democrats did not govern. And while evolution is now mandatory, the way it is phrased would make any US creationist, of any stripe, totally happy.
And that in a country where 61% of the population is not a member of any church.

Come on, this thing is kind of cool. Once we relegate the believers to the status of, say, trekkies or Tolkein nuts, we can enjoy the contributions of all their crazy hobbyists without the bad taste.

Alan Kellog, you mean you've never seen a hippociraptor?
'Our Shem, get in there and stop that Raptor rogering that Hippo.'
'Sod off, Dad.'

The BBC did a programme about the flood and the ark three years ago: they computer modelled the Ark with dimensions as described in Genesis and using the boatbuilding technology of the day. Launched, it broke up and sank. It didn't last 40 seconds, far less 40 days and nights. Will the Dutch thing be afloat and open for business, because if so its plans will have to be approved by an outfit like Lloyds and and I suspect any right thinking agency will show these eegits the door.

We at the Beagle Project have plans from the original Cherokee class brigs, we know where the remains of the original lie and we're increasingly sure that in 2009 there'll be a replica afloat. We'll challenge the Ark to a round the cans race.

There is no plan for actually sailing it, except to tow it to some place

It is enough if an ark floats, as many notes.

Presumably people noted sea sediments high up on land, and needed an explanation. Probably also people obsessed with a useless project ('touched by gods') needed to be explained, to be less threatening and peculiar.

The biggest 'poof' here is the global addition and removal of the water cover. Perhaps the abrahamic gods took a leak, and scooped up the the liquid afterwards?

Measurements show that plate tectonics catches some water, but not of religious proportions:

"I call it the Beijing anomaly. Water inside the rock goes down with the sinking slab and it's quite cold, but it heats up the deeper it goes, and the rock eventually becomes unstable and loses its water. The water then rises up into the overlying region, which becomes saturated with water.

"If you combine the volume of this anomaly with the fact that the rock can hold up to about 0.1 percent of water, that works out to be about an Arctic Ocean's worth of water."

http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=arti…

It is no surprise to most of us that christian texts really doesn't hold water. :-)

By Torbjörn Larsson (not verified) on 28 Apr 2007 #permalink

the 350,000 named species of beetle

From when is this number? Thousands of insect species are described every year.

BTW, woodchucks can chuck wood, at a rate that has been measured and published in the Annals of Improbable Research.

By David Marjanović (not verified) on 29 Apr 2007 #permalink