Oh I learned about this one! I think it's interesting to learn about how people rationalize their crazy beliefs.
The Bible doesn't talk about two of every species. Species is a scientist word. It talks about two of every kind of animal. What you and I call a species, creationists consider to be natural variation within the kind, not unlike different breeds of dog. So for example lions and cheetahs are different variations of the cat kind, and likewise all the beetles are just variations of the locust kind. So Noah just brought two locusts, and their reproduction led to all our beetles.
Source: My buddy went to the Creationist Museum in Kentucky.
I follow a lot of creationist content, and there isn't actually a solid definition for what a "kind" is, or a mechanism for how kinds split into all the variation we see today, especially if you are using a YEC model.
Creationist ideas aren't created based on observation. They usually have a problem, like the fact that all species physically could not have fit on any sort of boat, and they ask themselves "what would make this possible," then they accept whatever they hypothesize as fact. In this case, the idea of kinds leads to several other problems, like how exactly did the diversity we see today evolve from kinds, or how genetic bottlenecks were avoided, etc. etc. Creationists aren't scientists though, so they aren't seriously interested in exploring their own theories beyond the base explanation
I also wouldnt go so far as to say "the Bible says this." The Bible probably meant something closer to species, or what the people who wrote it would have thought of as a species, and the idea of "kinds" is a new interpretation exclusive to post-Darwin apologism
The real problem I always find with these debates is no one mentions what happens after the animals climb off the ark. What do the predators eat for the next several years while the herbivores repopulate? Have you seen an area after a flood? The plants and trees are devastated. Those plants were under water for 40 days. So what are the herbivores going to eat in that time?
I think Noah's ark completely falls apart when you are trying to piece together the aftermath.
I was raised as a young-Earth creationist. Every adult in my life up through the age of 20 or so was a young-Earth creationist. These people are happy to use scientific explanations when it suits them, but they aren’t looking for or expecting a comprehensive naturalistic explanation for everything. If God can magically get all the “kinds” of animals on a boat then magically flood the Earth with water for over a month before magically draining it away, what’s a little more magic to redistribute the animals while keeping them fed and healthy afterwards?
Or how do you feed them on the ark. Or how do you prevent death from natural causes. The version that has 7 of every kind helps with this, but also makes the mass and space problem worse.
I agree, it's the kind of story that only makes sense when you have zero biological knowledge and "every species" is limited to every distinct animal whatever person wrote it had seen. It also seems to imply a flat earth model, as the "firmament" that held the waters up always seems to appear in those, though I'm not sure if that was the intention
The argument you'll hear a lot of theologians bring forth to blanket cover any of these is "God stopped that from happening. God kept the animals alive."
Then why didn't God just remake all the animals after he wiped the slate clean? The argument about saving animals from dying would fall apart because the flood is killing thousands of other ones.
But I completely agree, any one with an ounce of scientific knowledge that has given all this more than a minute's thought would come to the same conclusion. It's a fabricated story.
Yeah, unfortunately when you appeal to miracles you start to run into theological inconsistenties, as you said. Many creationists do try to avoid appealing to them as a result, but that means they end up in an uncomfortable limbo of nitpicking better science without any clear model of their own
"Picking and choosing" within the Bible is widely denigrated as an inferior practice among believers. But the book is not even internally consistent, even before it fails to comport with known reality. Nitpicking is basic Christianity, and it accounts for the enormous proliferation of churches that all read the same book differently.
Then why didn't God just remake all the animals after he wiped the slate clean?
Because he didn't feel like it. It is all nonsense but that isn't really something you can claim breaks the logic because you can't prove that God would have to act in any given way.
Not that it matter all that much as it's all bullshit, and after 40 days everything would be dead anyway, but the situation is worse than that. 40 Days is the period for which it rained. It was on the first day of the 10th month that the water had receded enough for the tops of the mountains to become visible.
Or you can explain it as being based on the legendary story of a Sumerian king from a city in ancient Iraq who loaded a bunch of people, livestock, and seeds on a boat and managed to outlast a massive flood c. 2900 BC. The king was probably real, and the flood was real (there is extant physical evidence of it), but we have no way of testing other details of the story. Whoever was writing the material that eventually became the Hebrew Bible thought it was a cool story and tossed it in, with significant embellishment.
If someone were to go to "The Ark Experience" or w.e that re-creation is called, you would... well should, instantly know that story is baloney. You should be disappointed and questioning life, not happy and reinforcing a fairy tale. It is just so blatantly obvious.
Look, it's not far from what evolution requires to be believable.
That the life would get created on its own anywhere in the universe is very not probable (we talking probability much much less than 1%), and yet we are here, so it must've happened, right? We just got lucky, it happens (apparently).
Evolution makes no statements about how life was "created", it's an extremely well evidenced theory of how life evolves gradually into more complex forms suited to their environment via the process of natural selection. That's a common creationist talking point that really misunderstands what evolution is, along with other common misconceptions like humans evolving from monkeys (it's actually sharing a common ancestor) or the idea that "fittest" means "strongest."
There is no probability associated with life existing, either. It's not something we have near enough knowledge of to put a number to
Anytime someone talks about the chance of life existing with any sort of concrete numbers, they are really just saying "it seems improbable to me," it's not based on any sort of actual evidenced calculations.
"“The overall prevalence of sequences performing a specific function by any domain-sized fold may be as low as one in 10⁷⁷.”
— Douglas D. Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds”, Journal of Molecular Biology, 2004
Now, I don't know if he's right or not, however even if the calculation is wrong by 20-30 orders of mafnitude, it is still astronomically high number, and for one working enzyme.
Putting aside whether than number is right or wrong, it also is not the probability of life being created. The paper you are referencing does not make this claim, nor does it attempt to answer this question.
It's a very hypothetical estimate about probabilities involved with protein folding.
Maybe you could use this number in an abstract way to raise some questions about abiogenesis, but it's definitely not claiming to be a probability of the creation of life
Sure, but life does need several of those proteins to exist. It’s not „probability of life” but it is „small part of the probability of life” and even this is big number.
Again, that's not the probability of those proteins "existing," and it's also not the mechanism evolution works by. To steal from some criticism of the paper:
"In case of the proteins, evolution doesn't work by generating newly (random) 300 residue proteins that work 1 time in a billion. Probably in one generation a copy of the protein is made with the same function, and during many generations the function of this protein drifts towards a new function, while all the intermediate proteins stay folded because they're not that different."
So while it's an interesting number, it really has little to do with the probability of life existing. I think you are trying to plug this number into a formula it's not intended for
Yes, that is how it works in the fully functioning life, but to make this copy there need to already be a minimal working cell, which needs several of those enzymes to exist.
I know, that once you get going this theory is very solid, however, the "get going" part is still unsolved.
I agree, however that is also not part of evolutionary theory and not something that evolution requires to be believable.
Since the "get going" part is still theoretical, there also still isn't a solid probability associated with it. There is a reason the paper you cite doesn't make the leap to saying the probability it mentions is the probability of abiogenesis.
Also across an incredibly accelerated amount of time. Begs the questions why we don’t see changes happening across species right now. It’d be noticeable day-to-day. Rapid evolution creates immense competition, which in turn drive evolution as each species tries to find its specialty. Lmao that museum is such a joke. They have an exhibit dedicated to explaining that the earth is only 2k years old or whatever due to how some airplane sunk in ice.
It's honestly insane how many people in this day and age believe this story in literal sense. On the one hand at least they are more consistent following their book but on the other the mental gymnastics required to actually present it like something that has actually happened is really something else. You have these YECs claiming they only took one of each "kind", not all species. Basically saying the evolution is happenning at insane speed but still insisting there are some hardcoded limits and one "kind" cannot become another.
On the one hand at least they are more consistent following their book
Its literally impossible. Theology trying to reckon with all the inconsistent rules in the Bible is practically it's own branch of morality (except it's based on stories instead of a rationally deduced philosophy).
They basically selectively toss some laws into the "meant for the people of this region/caste/race/era and put others in the "true law" category based often in which industry is sponsoring which bishops or which cultures they are trying to convert.
"Kind" is great because they can make it be whatever level of evolution is convenient in the moment. Simultaneously broad enough to fit on a relatively tiny boat but also somehow exploding magically into all the species variation we have in a few thousand years, at rates that would require superspeed evolution on a level comparable to Pokemon.
Which is really funny because the anti evolution people are advocating for a more extreme form of evolution than even scientists argue for to explain the huge number of species.
It's funny because I don't think they took insects on the boat at all. Not sure what the museum thinks though.
The Bible talks about Noah taking "living" things, and what is alive in the biblical sense is very different to what we may consider alive. It's usually an and/or situation of whether the creature has blood, breath in it's nostrils, or a soul. Something like grass or trees would not qualify for example, and I don't think insects would either as there anatomy is far different to be considered bleeding/breathing creatures.
They'd more than likely be fine anyway. If the world was flooded, there may not be land, but they're definitely would be plenty of floating debris for a while.
I mean, none of this happened so it doesn't really matter. It's like trying to figure out the scientific reasons for why Excalibur stayed in the rock for everyone but Arthur. It's a fairy tale.
Everyone else tried to pull at an angle instead of straight up. They also pulled too quickly. The stone isn’t solid stone. Nobody thought to look inside until now, but our scientists have discover a non-Newtonian filling that acts as a cement glue if an inserted item is pulled at an angle or with too much force too quickly. It acts like a cat’s claws in that if you try to remove your hand from their belly too quickly, you are only ensnaring yourself more. Thus, only a noodle-armed boy could gently remove it up and out of the enclosure.
Also, magnets. It was an elaborate ruse set up by Merlin.
If the entire earth were violently flooded, no, the bugs would not have been "fine" lol. Bugs still need air to breathe, food to eat, and all sorts of other environmental parameters particular to each species.
There's zero way to reconcile the Noah's ark myth with reality, it was either fully magic or it didn't happen. The earth today is just not compatible with that event being part of its history, full stop.
Lol, I don't know about hostility, but I was definitely challenging your claim on bugs being fine in a global flood situation. I don't think that's bringing "negativity."
Well, the definition of what Noah considers alive might not be relevant to the situation. Without evolution to make new species, pretty much everything that can't live underwater for a month has to be on the boat, or else they shouldn't exist.
So stuff like rock plants needs to be on the boat too, no matter if Noah considered it alive or not.
Bill Nye had a great response to this in his debate with Ken Ham. If that's what creationists want to believe, then they believe in speciation by evolution to an insane degree, something which they normally deny ("we believe in micro evolution not macro evolution" type shit). If they only took 7000 "kinds" of animals on board, then over the next 4000 years 11 species would have had to evolved per day in order to get the 16 million species we have on earth today.
I grew up young earth creationist and even as an indoctrinated child I never understood how this is different from evolution lol. If anything it's even more extreme than the real theory claims, since you're talking about species differentiating from a small set of "kinds" into the biodiversity we see today in a couple thousand years.
"Kinds" adapting and changing like that is literally the definition of evolution. It wasn't until I deconverted thay I realized all these people are just stupid and don't know what evolution actually is.
I would love to be able to go back in time to hear the first time this story was told.
My understanding is that many scholars believe early Torah/Old Testaments stories started verbally before writing and are much older than most people think.
Obviously Noah is a way for humans to figure out where we came from and why many species are so similar and how there was a reset after Adam and Eve. And it’s crazy that it MIGHT be a holdover story of memory when the earth was a larger ocean a looooong time ago. Adam and Eve story is probably not even as old as Noah’s but I don’t know enough. Creation myths are much easier to invent than a fucking reset button on life.
I would love to be able to go back in time to hear the first time this story was told.
My understanding is that many scholars believe early Torah/Old Testaments stories started verbally before writing and are much older than most people think.
Obviously Noah is a way for humans to figure out where we came from and why many species are so similar and how there was a reset after Adam and Eve. And it’s crazy that it MIGHT be a holdover story of memory when the earth was a larger ocean a looooong time ago. Adam and Eve story is probably not even as old as Noah’s but I don’t know enough. Creation myths are much easier to invent than a fucking reset button on life.
Or is it that they are both creation myths, but someone decided to put them in a particular order at some point!?
Right, so in their view why are there so many species of dog in the world?
God created everything. Then only two of each group were saved, so only one breed of dog remains. There's no such thing as evolution... So how do we have so many dog breeds?
So for example lions and cheetahs are different variations of the cat kind, and likewise all the beetles are just variations of the locust kind. So Noah just brought two locusts, and their reproduction led to all our beetles.
But they deny evolution.
Logic?
Ask your buddy how he's about to fit that into his logic.
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u/Gredelston Sep 13 '26
Oh I learned about this one! I think it's interesting to learn about how people rationalize their crazy beliefs.
The Bible doesn't talk about two of every species. Species is a scientist word. It talks about two of every kind of animal. What you and I call a species, creationists consider to be natural variation within the kind, not unlike different breeds of dog. So for example lions and cheetahs are different variations of the cat kind, and likewise all the beetles are just variations of the locust kind. So Noah just brought two locusts, and their reproduction led to all our beetles.
Source: My buddy went to the Creationist Museum in Kentucky.