Can the Ark carry all the animals and birds?


Those sentences which are colored in orange are from Maharishi Dayananda Saraswati book Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth) and those which are colored in black are Jerry Thomas’s response.


"The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth if it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with tee. And of every living thing of all flesh, tow of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive. And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them. Thus did Noah, according to all that God commanded him, do did he." (6:15, 18, 19 – 22).

C. Now can any enlightened men ever believe a being, who uttered such impossible things which are opposed to the dictum of knowledge, to be God? "How" could any ark of the said dimensions contain (male and female) elephants, camels and millions of other living things, and all the different kinds of foods and drinks that they as well as the whole family of Noah would need? This book is, therefore, a human work. Whoever wrote it was not a learned man either.


Answer: This question in fact exposes the blatant and pathetic ignorance of Maharishi though he would have thought of himself as a very wise man. This Maharishi would have been in fact shocked to realize that the Ark of Noah with those dimensions can contain all the animals and the birds. Not only that Maharishi lacked knowledge about the dimensions of Ark, he seems to have been ignorant of the number of species.

Here is the relevant information from http://www.icr.org/bible/Genesis/6:14-16/:

“The dimensions of the ark were ideally designed both for stability and capacity. It has been shown hydrodynamically that the ark would have been practically impossible to capsize and would have been reasonably comfortable, even during violent waves and winds. Assuming the ancient cubit to have been only 17.5 inches (the smallest suggested by any authority), the ark could have carried as many as 125,000 sheep-sized animals. Since there are not more than about 25,000 species of land animals known (that is, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians), either living or extinct, and since the average size of such animals is certainly much less than that of a sheep, it is obvious that all the animals could easily have been stored in less than half the capacity of Noah’s ark, each pair in appropriate “rooms” (literally “nests”).”