Why do skeptics love to harp on the ark story?

Question

I feel like the story of Noah's ark gets way more questions than it deserves. I mean, I believe heartily that it happened, and I feel like I've given really simple answers to most of the questions I've bothered answering - most of them directly answered in the text.

What gets me is the choice of the ark. the account goes into great detail about the size (it was big), the shape (it was seaworthy), the animals (they came to Noah), their food (Noah was told to gather), and even as recently asked, gave animals sufficent time to be frisky if they wanted! Its part of many, many culture's narratives. Let's face it, as far as miracle stories go, it's pretty tame.

I mean, I happen to know that God became a man, died on a cross, and raised himself from the dead!

If God can become man, die, and live again, I think he he can build a frickin' boat! So, why pick on this story? The ark has nothing to do with my salavation.

So why is everybody so fixated on it?

Jon Ericson is right - and I wish I had actually written this three days ago when I wanted to.

I'm done with my rant!

Answer 1

Actually, it's not just unbelievers. How many times have you seen a nursery at church that wasn't decorated with an Ark motif? (The story is attractive because of all the cute animals. Oddly, you never see depictions of the horrors of destruction: the primary point of the story.) There's a truly bizarre theme park in Hong Kong built around a life-sized ark model, which I assume is designed to bring in Christians. The story appeals, in part, because it's a logistical problem that seems solvable.

But to respond to the implied question, I think we'll need to be very aggressive about closing duplicate questions. Hopefully we'll have a stable of good answers to link people to and we'll get fewer new questions popping up. Google will probably pull in new users that way over time.

Answer 2

I would guess it is because the ark story emphasizes less the suspension of the laws of nature--miracles--than other events in the Bible (such as the burning bush, walking on water, the resurrection) and, instead, mostly emphasizes Noah and crew's know-how and hard work. And, since the events of the ark story are of immense proportions, it is difficult to believe, sans miracles, that any small group, or even all of humanity, could pull of that feat. The more one knows about biology, ecology, agriculture, taxonomy, geography, and living with one's in-laws for 40 days on a boat, the more difficult it becomes. As it is still being thought of in the frame of a (mostly) non-miraculous event, it is perhaps more of a magnet for arguments.

Whereas "fully miraculous" stories are much less prone to provoke arguments; one either accepts that a man was raised from the dead or one doesn't.

Answer 3

It is the chapters about "things" (physical reality, rather than people) that contain enough information to feel like they such be provable or at least fit into our modern knowledge of how reality/physics/etc works that promote the most controversy. So: creation and Noah are always going to get more focus than most areas, because they stick out like a sore thumb compared to the bulk of the text which is mostly about people and cultures. It isn't a big step to accept "there was a person called X who said Y to Z" - and no real evidence/counter-evidence either way to contend with.

I agree there have been more questions about the flood than many other things, but my interpretation is that many of those have not been asked by "skeptics", but by believers who struggle with it. Embrace this! It illustrates a real problem that many Christians have - which is essentially the site's mantra. In fact, I suspect that it is precisely because it tries to be fairly detailed that makes it so hard to accept - in that when the details are placed under the modern eye (no matter whether by a believer or skeptic), it does have significant issues. Contrary to some Christians' view that this is a mostly non-miraculous event (about human endeavour), if you don't accept many many many miracles, it requires a massive "suspension of disbelief" to read it. The fact is that there are a lot of important problems, that interestingly wouldn't have been obvious to a writer without modern knowledge - but modern or not they would have needed solving at the time.

Hence the problem is that for many believers it has enough detail to cause alarm bells that doing things with a global flood simply wasn't a sensible approach to the problem, and that just "vanishing" the people you don't want would be simpler and require less supernatural intervention.

Additionally tied into this is the growing field of history: most historians agree that there is plenty of cultural evidence to support one or several significant floods, but not really as described in the Bible, and issues such as cultures of similar and older ages to the supposed chronology dates. Don't shoot the messenger, but: this then prompts the question:

Is there a simpler explanation? Is this just one culture's way of rationalising a flood event that was significant and frightening to them, which uprooted their society and was beyond their ability to comprehend?

Substitute "flood" for any physical event; the answer to questions such as these are... Well, each religion has an answer, and none of them agree.

Answer 4

There are two major types of questions here.

1. Questions, where the asker is curious to know the answer.
2. Questions asked not to get an answer, but only to "prove a point", usually using the straw-man strategy. In this case the askers already have their answers they firmly believe in, and only ask so that others will answer and they can point out what they believe as inconsistencies in the answers.

It seems most questions about the Ark fall into the second type.

There is actually a rule on the site: you should not post rants disguised as questions, or questions that solicit a debate. However, these are easy to filter out when the topic is programming (the original StackExchange site), but difficult here.

Answer 5

I suspect it's a combination of factors.

1. The Ark story is a prime example of the authors of the Bible not knowing what they're talking about. After the Ark landed on Mount Arrarat, all the marsupials made their way directly to Australia without leaving any trace anywhere else? The narrative is, on its face, absurd.

2. It's a well-told and gripping story. It's also a fairly simple narrative, easy to summarise and to understand.

3. We can tell where the story came from, seeing how it developed from the Epic of Gilgamesh and other ancient Near Eastern texts. We can trace how the myth developed and changed in the telling. That makes it quite interesting to textual critics and historians.

4. It's a story Conservative Christians like to tell lies about. Fake "science" books, claiming to demonstrate geological evidence for the Flood, are common. (A while ago, there was an outcry at some such pseudoscientific drivel being for sale in the shop at the Grand Canyon. Obviously a science-based government body should not be supporting pseudoscience.)