The Myth of Jesus

- Noah and the Flood


A conservative estimate of the lifeforms that Noah would have had to collect is:
Insects: 1,000,000
Mammals: 4,008
Birds: 8,600
Reptiles: 6,252
Amphibians: 2,000
Total species - 1,020,860
Total if in pairs - 2,041,720

According to the Bible, Noah's sons existed before he began collecting the species. One of his sons, Shem, was born 1,558 years after creation and the flood took place 1,656 years after creation. Therefore, Noah had about 98 years to collect all two million life forms. In order for Noah to do this he would have to collect 20,832 species a year, or 57 species a day. Taking into account the travel time required to gather all the life forms on earth, Noah's task would have clearly been impossible.
Additionally, Noah would have had to feed and care for all these animals during the time that he collected them, and during the flood itself; therefore he would also have to collect many times more species simply for feed stock. There is also the fact that in addition to doing this, there would have been several tons of animal excrement to remove every day.
Furthermore, there is the fact that many species on this planet cannot exist outside their ecosystems (For example, how did Noah keep the polar bear alive in the climate of the Middle East?).
There are the additional problems of why there is no indisputable evidence of a global flood and how the animals who were dependent on a vegetable/fruit diet could survive after they got back on dry land, and also how they were able to migrate to other land masses surrounded by oceans, e.g., Australia.

The existence of Noah and the Flood may seem a minor matter, but fundamentalists have made 'the search for Noah's Ark' into an almost-comic soap story, and secondly, Jesus is reported to have believed in Noah and the global Flood (Matt 24:37-39, Luke 17:26-27) thus indicating his ignorance and the unreliability of what he is supposed to have said.

For further information, see:
TalkOrigins: Problems with a global flood
Why the myth of Noah's Ark makes no sense