Koalas are fussy eaters...

 

On a mountain top in Turkey, a rock formation being explored by archeologists has a boat-like shape. Hopes are being expressed on social media that this could be the petrified Noah’s Ark. Traces of what might have been organic material have been excavated. It would be a fascinating find for fundamentalist Christians if proven, and if its interior could be discerned in the specimen.

I imagine, for instance, 3,500 tiny jars, each one holding a pair of each variety of mosquito. Of course there’d be protestations that mosquitoes would survive the flood because they hatch in water, but then, where would female mosquitoes get the blood they need to reproduce?

And the number and size of storage containers for the different fodder-needs would be mind-boggling. Koalas are fussy eaters, and won’t touch bovine, equine hay supplies, just eucalyptus leaves, thank you very much. 

And the manure! 

There’d have to be millions of bird cages. Perching, non-swimmers couldn’t survive the forty days and forty-nights-plus on their own. Ducks and herons and pelicans might have been OK.

The evidence that the Noah’s Ark story never literally happened can’t possibly be erased by a rock formation that’s shaped a bit like a water vessel. The simple observation that at the time of the alleged flooding of the earth to a depth that would have to be at least 2,000 metres above sea level, Asian, African,  Australasian, American, etc., populations would have to have been wiped out, which they decidedly were not.  

The Durupınar formation (elevation ca.2000 metres) in Turkey is the latest of many attempts to justify belief in the Biblical accounts of Noah’s Ark as being historical.

Much more intriguing and informative for me is in the connection between the Adam and Noah allegories. I understand the eating of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil to be a metaphor for the rise of consciousness in humans, and the subsequent capabilities it opened. In the creation allegory, God says “if you eat of the fruit, you shall surely die.” That is, you will have the option to choose at every turn, and you will inevitably choose badly when it matters most, because you will rely on your own “god-likeness” to be sufficient.

A modern allegory making a similar point is George Orwell’s Animal Farm where the hogs overturn the farmer and then sink into the same abyss of pleasure seeking and misanthropy that ignited the animals’ rebellion in the first place.

The Noah’s Ark story serves as the “See, I told you so” of Eden’s parting of ways.

In an episode of The Rest is Science, Hanna Fry raises the possibility of scientific and technological discovery being inevitable, i.e. if Bell had not invented the telephone, someone else would have. Similarly, it would have made no difference if pioneers of AI had sensed the danger and shut down the lab. Someone else would inevitably have had access to the same data and techniques and would have carried on. 

Human curiosity and the “Wow! We did it!” chutzpa entered humanity at the proverbial eating of the fruit of The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Its possible effect dramatized in the drowning of all but the most humble, most faithful of their number… the very, very few.

We’ve come to read the Bible as a whole, single story. That’s not a bad thing... if the tendency to insist that it be read as a history is taken into account. To read it as one valuable parable that has the power to help us in the interpretation of our world today is another way, and for me, it’s been a better way.

It’s not in believing in the historicity of the Bible that we are “saved,” but its in the application of its repeated principles that we may come to understand ourselves, and thereby find pathways to the peaceable kingdom.

That is, if our parents and teachers have taught us to read… I mean, really read.

Note: I’m aware that AI would have written this for me given a few pointers. And someone seeing this post might skip over it because the doubt that now faces humanity concerning what they read, see, and hear is everywhere. I’ve invented a symbol, NAICA, (No AI Content or Assistance) as my guarantee that it’s “human written.”

NAICA

George G. Epp, gg.epp41@gmail.com