The logical consequences of the story of Noah's Ark are astounding if it is indeed literally true:
- There are hundreds of thousands of species of animal. Noah would have had to build his ark large enough to accomodate two of everything. If we reject the theory of evolution, this includes such things as two elephants, two rhinoceroses, and all of the acquatic life present on the planet, including all of the whales (and presumably he would need to build a tank big enough to hold all of the acquatic life, since he needed to keep them alive for forty days and forty nights).
- Noah would have had to get all of the animals. This includes all of the acquatic animals that live on the ocean floor. Noah must have built one hell of a diving suit to accomplish this feat. Noah would also have had to capture two lions, two cheetahs, two bears, etc. without having the animals kill him.
- Noah and his family would have to monitor every single carnivorous species twenty-four hours a day to ensure that nothing ate anything else. This includes all of the acquatic life. I suppose that diving suit will come in handy here as well.
- Somehow, God caused it to rain so much that all of the water-dwelling animals would die as well. I'm not sure how this one would work.
- What if there were, say, a Himalayan guru living on a mountain some 1,000 meters above sea level? It would take no less than 5.11 x 1022 liters of rain water to drown this person. That's 51,100,000,000,000,000,000 liters. That's an average rainfall of 1.28 x 1019 liters per day. That's an awful lot of rain, and I'm not even touching on how long it would take the sun to naturally evaporate that much water.
Of course, this could all be explained away by saying "God allowed it to happen", but if God could do all of the above, why did he need Noah to go to all the trouble to make the Ark? Couldn't he just have snapped his fingers and have all of the bad people on the world disappear?
That is perhaps the most intelligent argument I have seen regarding this issue.
