Here is something I did by myself. I have yet to have one YEC refute my simple (less than 6th grade) math. So take me on and show me your math.
According to
Panda.org, which is part of the WWF, there are two types of elephants: the Asian and the African. Obviously if we believe the Bible, there would have been at least four elephants on the ark.
The Asian elephant eats around 300kg of fodder per day (see above source), while fully grown African elephants eat up to
200kg of food/day.
Now, we know from Gen 6:21 that Noah was commanded to take food for all the animals and his family, thus nullifying a possible miracle explanation for not needing to bring food. However, in the interest of being conservative, lets assume that Noah had younger elephants and thus needed less food than a full grown adult (although growing children need their vegetables!!!). So lets assume that the elephants needed half of their adult counterparts.
Therefore, collectively, the Asian and African elephants would need approximately 500 kg of food/day. Thats 1,102.31 pounds a day!! In the interest of simplicity and being conservative in our estimates lets just say 1,000 pounds of food/day. For the (approximate) year that they were on the ark, that would mean NoahCo would have needed 365,000 pounds of food just for the elephants!!! This is 182.5 tons.
Next step, calculating how much space was in the ark. This has been done repeatedly so I hope there is little contention here. Gen. 6:15 says, "The length of the ark shall be 300 cubits (aprx. 450 feet), the breadth of it 50 cubits (aprx. 75 feet), and the height of it 30 cubits (aprx. 45 feet-ed.)." This is 1,518,750 cubic feet. Lets also assume for the sake of simplicity and being conservative that the ark was a perfect box with these dimensions (i.e., no space lost at the front or back due to needing to actually float, no need for going through sea/waves, no keel, etc). Also for the sake of simplicity and conservatism, lets assume by some miracle that there was no need for floors, which would take up even more space (this directly contradicts Gen 6:14, which instructs Noah to build rooms on the ark). This means the area of the ground floor would have been 33,750 sq. feet and that the total interior cubic feet are as stated above. Of course this is absurd as the animals, food, and NoahCo would have been stacked on top of each other for a year. I also assume that the animals do not have much chance to walk around and exercise. But lets continue.
Next we need to know approximately how much space the food for the elephants would have taken up (and ignoring the fact that most of it would have gone bad eventually in a hot damp environmentremember there was only one door and a small windowI would have hated to be on waste removal duty!). This also assumes that the food for only the elephants is being stored on the ground floor, and also ignoring the fact that many animals are carnivores. That would mean that many more than just a pair of many types of animals would have been needed to have been brought aboard to feed any given chosen pair. Of course these "feed" animals also needed to be kept alive, many of which were carnivores also, which meant that even more animals would have been needed. Its a geometrically unsolvable problem for such a situation.
Given that, Elephants are vegetarians; so lets assume that they were fed hay for the entire year (again ignore the monumental task of growing, harvesting, and storing of such an immense amount of hay by one family). According to this
website, "Regardless of bale size and stacking method, any building with 16' sidewalls will accommodate at least 1 ton of hay in every 20 square feet of floor area." This means one ton of hay needs 320 cubic feet of storage. But it does say 'at least', and of course this is assuming ideal conditions. So again for simplicity and conservatism, lets assume one ton of hay needs 300 cubic feet of storage. That means the 182.5 tons of hay needed for just the 4 elephants alone would have take up 54,750 cubic feet!! Thats about 3.6% of the space available on the ark, again assuming ridiculously conservative (and sometimes impossible, i.e., no floors) conditions. If we have adult elephants that eat twice as much (again at a very conservative estimate) thats 7.2% of the space in the ark for just 4 animals!!!! There is no physical possibility that Noah's ark ever happened. Considering there are anywhere from 1.5-1.8 million KNOWN species, I would love to know how NoahCo ever took care of even the smallest fraction of them. Thank you for reading.
