O-kay... my problem with _anyone_ who takes creationism seriously is that it
simply doesn't add up. Let's take my fav example, Ye Arke.

So, depending on what you use for a cubit, Ye Arke is about 450 feet long, 75
wide, and 45 tall, right? I work best in metres, so lets do a bit of
conversion: that's 137.16 by 22.86 by 13.716 metres, right? For ease of
calculation, let's call it 140 x 23 x 14. This give you 45.080e+3 cubic
metres. One cubic metre of pure water is one metric tonne. Salt water is a
bit more dense. Be nice, add another thousand tonnes or so... Ye Arke
displaces 46,000 tonnes. Maybe 46,400 at max. And I'm being generous. (The
reader who knows something about ship-building will also spot a certain minor
problem with the above figures. No creationist has ever seen it... in part
'cause if it's corrected, things get worse for Ye Arke.)

Problem 1: The sheer size. HMS _Victory_, still preserved at Portsmouth, was
186 feet long on the gundeck. HMS _Victoria_, the last full-rigged 1st rate
ship of the line to serve as flag of the Channel Fleet, built in 1859, was
250 feet long on the gundeck. And she had a steel frame because the RN had
found that building wooden ships much bigger than 225 feet long was not a
good idea because they tended to straddle or to hog on being launched; that
is, they tended to bend, their bows and sterns to stick up out of the water
at an angle, (that¹s straddling) or to bend the other way, the bows and
sterns supported by waves but the midships sections out of the water (or at
least not as well supported) (that¹s hogging) and either way their keels
tended to crack under the strain. Even with steel frames, wooden ships bigger
than 250 feet long tended to hog or straddle. Don't take my word for it, look
it up for yourself. One possible source: _The Wooden Fighting Ship In the
Royal Navy, 897-1860_, EHH Archibald, Blandford Press, London. Sorry, my copy
was published back before ISBNs. Edward Archibald was at the time of writing
the curator of the National Maritime Museum, Portsmouth, England. Or build a
wooden boat 250 feet long and see what happens. Ye Arke was the size of _two_
1st rate line of battleships, laid end-to-end. Noah was a shepherd. He knew
better than the shipwrights at Chatham who built the ships with which the RN
dominated the world for 150 years? If I'm wrong, and it is possible to build
a 450 foot wooden vessel, by all means demonstrate it. I'll even put up some
of the money... so long as I get to record the launch of said vessel. And so
long as those who say that such a craft would be safe are willing to stay on
it while it's being launched. Me, I figure that I'd get some _great_ pix.

Problem 2: Even though it's too big to work, Ye Arke is _too small_ to do its
job. Noah was at sea for a year. The Bible explicitly states that he carried
food for himself, his family, and the animals... where did he put it? John
Woodmorappe (who is, BTW, a creationist) in his book _Noah¹s Ark: A
Feasibility Study_, published by the Institute for Creation Research, El
Cajon, California, (the ICR is not merely creationist; it _requires_ that all
who work there take an oath that they feel that the Bible is inerrant, as
demonstrated on their web site) calculates that Noah's ark carried 5.5
million kilos by weight of animals. (I disagree with this figure, as it¹s
much too low, but for purposes of argument I¹ll use it.) He also estimates
that each animal, on average, ate one thirtieth of its body weight per day.
Let's see... 5.5 million kilos is 5,500 tonnes. Divide by 30, multiply by
365... 66.917e+3. (Ye Arke was at sea for over a year, according to Gen 7 and
8. I¹ll just use one year to keep things simple and to give Woody as much
slack as possible. Wouldn¹t want anyone to say that I was railroading him.)
Hmm. 67 thousand tonnes of food, by Woody's own figures. But... if you
remember, we calculated that Ye Arke could displace a max of 46,000 tonnes,
or 46,400 if we were being generous. And that included the mass of the boat
itself, and the animals. (Archimedes¹ Principle, you know) Looks like y'all
need at least two Arkes just to carry the food. So where¹s the mention of the
Great Barge Fleet in the Bible? I once tried to work out just how big an Arke
would have had to have been to carry the assorted animals and their food and
have space for proper cages and exercise areas so that the animals' muscles
don't atrophy... after I got to 900,000 tonnes displacement and still hadn't
accounted for all the good stuff, I stopped. That's _three times the size of
a supertanker_. Or _nine times the size of a nuke aircraft carrier_. There's
simply no way that a wooden vessel could ever be that big. No way at all.

Problem 3: In order to get the mass of the animals down, Woody pared things
down. He tried to define 'kind' so as to have, say, one pair of cat-like
whatevers, and have all present day cats, from house cats to lions,
descendants of that pair. Nice... except that doing it that way _requires_
evolution on a scale so massive and rapid that _no_ evolutionary biologist
would dare suggest it. And Woody does that with _all_ animals... It's the
only way he could get 'em to fit.

Problem 4: Even after he pares down the list (he posits 15,754 'kinds') he
has a problem. In order for there to be physically enough space inside Ye
Arke, Woody uses the _median_ to work out the size of cages. He says that if
you have hippos, elephants, rats, and dogs, you can use the _median_ size
animal and build cages for 'em, and they'll all fit. The median size,
according to Woody, that of a sheep. Using that, he can shoehorn enough cages
into Ye Arke to hold his 15,754 kinds... but only just. And the cages would
be sized so that an animal in it would be able to stand up, but not move
about... which means it gets no exercise, and its muscles will atrophy. And
it won't live to see the end of the voyage. Unfortunately, Woody can't think
of any other way to fit 'em all in.

Problem 5: Remember that 67,000 tonnes of food? What goes in must come out...
Noah and his crew (all eight of 'em) are gonna be kinda busy moving that
67,000 tonnes in one end, and removing the whatever amount of tonnes of waste
products out the other. _Each_ member of the crew would have about 2,000
'kinds' of animals to feed every day... and remember, some of those, the
clean ones, would be in sevens, and the others in pairs. Let's see. 15,754
divided by eight is a tad over 1,969. Number of seconds/day is 86,400. Noah &
Co. had 43.875 _seconds_ per 'kind' per day if they worked continously 24/7
for the year they were at sea to feed and clean 'em. Must've been trailing
bloody Cherenkov radiation as they ran about the boat, or at least sonic
booms. And, of course, if there were more 'kinds' than Woody's 15,754, Noah &
Co. would have had less time per 'kind', while if there were less 'kinds',
the hyperevolution problem would be worse.

Problem 6: Ye Floode itself. It covered the 'high hills and mountains'.
Hmm... Some creationists say that there was massive amounts of mountain
building post-Floode, which is why Everest, for example, is as tall as it is.
For the purposes of argument, I'll take 'em at their word. How tall _were_
the 'high hills and mountains', though? 100 feet? 1000 feet? 2000 feet? Well,
they'd better have been less than 250 feet, 'cause if you put that much water
above coral reefs, the reefs die. (You can check it for yourself.) Every
coral reef in the world should be dead... unless Noah carried a few corals
with him on Ye Arke, which gives him some extra problems. And which is not
supported by the Bible, anyway. It's easy to work out how much water would be
required for a Floode that size. Now, divide by 24 by 40, and you see how
much fell per hour in the 40 days and 40 nights... and that's one hell of a
lot of water, even if you restrict it to 250 feet extra. I've been in
hurricanes. They didn't dump anywhere _near_ that kind of water. Not even
within three orders of magnitude. No way a wooden boat's gonna survive that.
None. I won't bother go into varves, sandstones, and salt domes...

Problem 7: Plants. Not only would Noah have had to carry food for all the
animals (and, if predators such as tigers were then carnivores, this would
include extra animals to furnish food for said predators, while if they were
vegetarians, this would require extra fodder and an explanation as to when
and why they changed...) but he¹s gonna have to carry all the various plants
as well. All of them. Land plants don¹t care for major floods, and would all
die. Fresh-water plants don¹t like too much salt, and would all die. Marine
plants don¹t like too little salt and would all die. Estuary plants, who
don¹t care about the salt content, do care about water pressure... and would
all die long before the corals (see above) would. After Ye Floode would come
Ye Dust Storm, as the wind dries up the mud and blows away the topsoil
because there¹s no ground cover left to preserve it, it¹s all dead in Ye
Floode.

Problem 8: Aquatic life. Gen 7-8 simply does not mention aquatic life,
animals or plant. Perhaps fish don¹t have Œthe breath of life¹, as they don¹t
breath air, but whales and seals and such do. Did Noah carry whales and seals
on Ye Arke, too, and if so were they clean or unclean? (Whales are descended
from hooved, cud-chewing animals, and even still have multiple-chambered
stomachs, and so should be Œclean¹; that¹s seven of Œem... Seals are, I
think, descended from weasels, so they might be Œunclean¹.) The vast majority
of marine animals don¹t like it if there¹s too little salt, or too much water
pressure, or both; a Floode that could reach above Everest would kill them
all. (Some marine life _loves_ pressure, and die if there¹s too little, which
creates a different problem, see below) The vast majority of fresh-water
animals don¹t like it if there¹s too much salt, and are far less
pressure-resistant than marine life (how deep can you go in a lake, anyway?)
(except for Lake Baikal, that is...) so Ye Floode would kill them, too.
Worse, the Bible expressly states that all creatures not on board Ye Arke
died in Ye Floode. Noah now has to have large aquaria on his wooden barge...
I¹m kinda curious as to how Noah kept the pressure on the tanks containing
the deep-ocean life, so that they wouldn¹t die from decompression. And how he
kept the seven whales happy. Let¹s see... a tank big enough to hold seven
whales, so that they could swim around and use their baleen plates to sift
out the plankton. And another tank to grow more plankton for Œem, as seven
whales are gonna eat a lot of plankton. Unless, of course, the whales can be
convinced to eat hay... I can see it now. No teeth, but eating hay. And, of
course, the toothed whales (sperm whales and the various dolphins) would have
to be kept away from the fish tanks, and if the dolphins include a killer
whale or two, away from the other whales and the seals... And there had
better not be any leopard seals in the seals, for similar reasons. How big is
this barge again?

Problem 9: Disease/parasites. Tapeworm, AIDs, leprosy, etc, they¹re all
living creatures too. If they were not on Ye Arke, they died. Some of them
_require_ a _living_ host. Which one or ones of Noah¹s crew carried herpes,
which hookworm, which Ebola? How about ticks, fleas, lice?

Problem #10: Latent heat of vaporisation. Do you know how much heat water
releases when it turns from vapour to liquid? Ever have a steam burn? 1g of
steam condenses to 1g of liquid water plus 2261 joules! A cubic meter of
water is a million grams and the surface of the Earth is 5.09 x 10^8 km2 or
5.09 x1014 m2. Thus, if we drop a measely meter of water a day for 40 days,
the amount of energy released is 2261 joules/g * 1,000,000 g/m3 * 5.09*10^14
m3 per day or 1.15 * 10^24 joules a day or 249,300,000 megatonnes/day! The
pentagon would envy such an arsenal.

Put another way, for every m of water level increase, we have to release
2.261 billion joules/m2. At a rate of 1 m/day, this comes to 2.261 billion
joules/day/m2 or a radiance of 26 kilowatts/m2, roughly 20 times the
brightness of the sun! Result: The atmosphere rapidly turns into incandescent
plasma incinerating Noah and Ye Arke. Nothing survives, the oceans boil and
the land is baked into pottery.

There's more, but this has gotten too long already. If you _really_ want to
see why I use that sig, check out the t.o FAQs and run the calcs for
yourself. It's not difficult to do. It's simple. Anyone who takes Ye Arke
seriously either hasn't done the math or can't add.