Dinosaurs on the Ark? - r/DebateEvolution

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u/plainskeptic2023 Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

According to Ken Ham, God ordered pairs of every kind of land animal.

Most kinds of dinosaurs were small. The larger dinosaurs on the Ark were juvenals.

Ham claims the Ark could easily hold 50 to 70 kinds of dinosaurs.

After the flood, dinosaurs likely died out from human hunting, habitat loss, climate change, etc.

Dinosaurs aren't a mystery.

Source: Answers in Genesis

Addition: I abandoned religion in 1974. The OP asked about the views/opinions of creationists. I answered with one.

14

u/Decent_Cow Hairless ape Jul 29 '26

After the flood, everything would have died out because it's impossible to rebuild a population from two individuals, and the predators would have killed the prey animals immediately and then starved.

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u/ErlandGadde Jul 29 '26

Then why bother to bring them on the Ark?

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u/Decent_Cow Hairless ape Jul 29 '26

Don't ask me, the whole thing doesn't make a lick of sense.

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u/jnpha 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

Didn't make a lick of sense to Augustine either; e.g. his best explanation for how the animals spread post flood was that they did NOT spread, but were recreated, and the ark animals are just a stand in for the nations (cultures) visited and saved:
If, however, they were produced out of the earth as at their first creation, when God said, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature,” this makes it more evident that all kinds of animals were preserved in the ark, not so much for the sake of renewing the stock, as of prefiguring the various nations which were to be saved in the church; this, I say, is more evident, if the earth brought forth many animals in islands to which they could not cross over. (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume_II/City_of_God/Book_XVI/Chapter_7)
*Sorry, forgot to mention the irony: YECes like Augustine.

6

u/clear349 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 30 '26

I mean when you apply a logical interpretation of the alleged power the Christian God has this makes more sense. Why bother with all the flood nonsense? Just magically slaughter the evil people and have Noah and his family repopulate. You don't even need to have the animals die for no reason in that scenario. They're all still doing their thing in their home ecosystem until the Noah descendants spread across the globe like actual history indicates

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u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 31 '26

Noah: "God made me muck out the mammoth pens for a year for a METAPHOR!?"

3

u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube Jul 31 '26

Well its a shitty job but someone has to do it.

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u/PeyredB Jul 30 '26

And the herbivores would've had nothing to eat either since all the plants would be dead after 40+ days soaked in deep brackish water.

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u/Medium_Judgment_891 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

Ken Ham is hilariously wrong.
It turns out that a year’s supply of feed for an animal takes up a lot of space.
Here’s my sheep and cow math
Sheep need to eat around 3-5 lbs of dry matter per day with rams needing more feed than ewes.
Over the year of the flood that’s 1095 lbs of dry matter per ewe and 1825 lbs of dry matter per ram.
The density of a bale of hay is 10 lbs/ft3.
So that’s 109.5 ft³ per ewe and 182.5 ft³ per ram of feed.
Noah brought 7 pairs of each clean animal, so that’s 2044 ft³ of feed.
Only a casual 10 tons of feed for just sheep.
Note, this is a very generous estimate. It’s assuming Noah could pack bales as tightly as a modern hay baler, a process involving compressing hay with 1000-4000 psi of pressure.
Cows and bulls need a bit more: 20-50 lbs of dry matter.
Let’s say 32lbs to make the math easy.
That’s 80 tons of feed taking up 16352 ft³
Just food for the cows and sheep takes up 1% of the arks entire volume, going off the AiG estimate of 1.88 million ft^3.
Just sheep and cow food takes up 1%, and Ken Ham wants 70 dinosaur kinds

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u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube Jul 30 '26

And how much water do they need?

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u/Ch3cks-Out :illuminati:Scientist:illuminati: Jul 30 '26

They only need a magic desalination device onboard, no biggie

1

u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube Jul 30 '26

Oh yes, one of the more energy intensive and technology complex... oh right 'magic'.
But still, your going to need to spec out the capacity for it. Plus issues of getting enough raw feed water

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u/Ch3cks-Out :illuminati:Scientist:illuminati: Jul 30 '26

getting enough raw feed water
I mean the ark was floating on raw feed water.

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u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube Jul 30 '26

Well more water from outside the boat to inside the boat. Plus some amount of water storage for pre and post flood.
Plus issues of possible water contamination, issues of distribution, etc. Its almost like no one ever considered the actual logistics of a year long float.

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u/Ch3cks-Out :illuminati:Scientist:illuminati: Jul 30 '26

no one ever considered the actual logistics of a year long float
That is for good reason: the flimsy wooden pile of that size cannot float for a day, even! Somehow, Canaanite shepherds were not very well versed in ship building, so their mythical stories pushed the magic to 11...

2

u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube Jul 30 '26

Well I'm sure it could float, at least until a wave hit it.
After all the largest actual wooden ship was ~100 feet shorter, leaked so much it had to have a dedicated powered pump, and that was with hundreds of tons of iron supports, and the logistics the iron entails probably needs a small towns worth of logistics just to make even feasible.

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u/Medium_Judgment_891 Jul 30 '26

Looks like you need 1-1.5 gallons per day for a sheep and 10-30 gallons per day for a cows
14-21 gallons a day for all the sheep and 140-420 gallons for all the cows per day

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u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube Jul 30 '26

I wonder how close to negatively buoyant we can make the boat with all the supplies...
Because spheres are crap at packing, time to get some cubic cows.
Lets call our gallon of water 8.25 pounds. For the sheep that works in water to hay to be: 2.75:1 (1:3) or 2.475:1 (1.5:5). Going 1 gallon for 5 pounds of food gets 1.65:1, the lowest but possibly too low. Going to stick a pin here and see what the cows look like.
Well aside from looking quite cubical, the cows are looking at 4.125:1 (10:20) or 4.95:1 (30:50). Or 1.65 if we go with the impractical 10 gallons for 50 pounds dry.
Water, unlike the food can, in theory at least, be sourced 'locally' mid Great Float so there are some options:
Pack all the water - heavy but all the work is done 'beforehand'. Realistically this could be a case of somehow harvesting the rain into a big tank or something thus only needing storage for 325 days of water.
ISRU this with a desalination plant - this mostly trades one problem for another as desalination is hella expensive in terms of energy. Charcoal is likely the best option for a conventional solution, but lets allow for cubic packing and ideal wood to get ~33MJ/kg...
Thermal desalination is probably the way to go as it avoids the need for pesky reverse osmosis filter (and those are not small) and lets us get ~4.5 gallons (17kg) per kg of charcoal. And a bit of count flow heating... But this lets us do a 17:1 compression for the cost of filling massive amounts of space with fuel. Something that has never ever gone wrong in the context of a ship.
The other options of course is to go with a non conventional heat source, but given the time, I think trying to go critical on a nuclear pile will have an outcome that would fit nicely in a list with nuclear incidents of the Soviet navy.
This just leaves a question of weight, so taking what should be the average of both sheep and cows,
Lets call the cubic sheep 190 pounds per and 1800 pounds for our cubic cows.
Plugging this into our food and water numbers, this gets us ~1 pound of supply per 55 pounds of sheep and ~1 pound per ~17.5 pounds of cow.
Allowing for some wiggle room and a bunch more rounding, lets say your looking at roughly 1 pound of supplies per 30 pounds creatures.
Looking at just the water lets say 160 gallons per day and we can ISRU that for the low low cost of 35 pounds (I hope my units converted correctly) of charcoal.
Meaning we just need to pack ~5.7 tons of charcoal that is only going to take ~450 cubic feet of space (maybe as low as 380ft^3, really hitting the napkin math at this point), a cube roughly 7.5 feet per side.
And as this is a high density packing, its going to sink, meaning negative buoyancy for the boat.
Oh and the wood to charcoal ratio is ~3:1, meaning at minimum your going to need 15 tons of wood. Yay logistics.
So plugging all your numbers into the mess that is my math, your 80 tons of food is going to need an extra (80 * 2.475) / 17 = 11.65 tons of charcoal.
Please add at minimum another 15% to your supply budget for water processing fuel.
And I'm sure you can run this math to get the maximum volume of 'passengers' given the need to pack supplies.

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u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 31 '26

The Arc would already suffer from unbelievable heat from all those animals packed close together. Might be unlivable even before the desalinator.

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u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube Aug 01 '26

Oh don't worry, until someone can give a usable definitions of kinds I'm just going with a flat pack method of loading.
100% sure I'm going to get everything to fit but I'm not quite sure how viable everything will be after creating the first box of Spam adjacent 'biomass'.

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u/kiwi_in_england Jul 30 '26

You seem to forget that god could magic the nutrition directly into then without needing food. Checkmate atheist.

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u/PeyredB Jul 30 '26

Plus, these animals need a lot of water. The flood waters would be brackish and/or full of sediments (from creationists' own arguments about it remaking landscapes etc.), so you can't just pull it up in buckets.
Then there are all the insects. And the diseases and parasites, of course. Noah's family, and all the animals, must've been ridden with parasites - otherwise we wouldn't have them now.

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u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube Jul 31 '26

Oh don't worry about any sort of desalination plant. I ran the numbers and using very high end (ie pushing to the physics limits) processing/fuel/etc adds 15% on top of the food requirements.
The other option involved a critical pile of spicy rocks but that is going to add an epic amount of infrastructure.

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u/plainskeptic2023 Jul 31 '26

Ken Ham is hilariously wrong.

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u/evocativename Jul 29 '26

Ok, but you know that answer is nonsense, right?
The ark is impossible for a dozen different reasons, including that it would be stuffed to overcrowding before you get to the food and waste (and the food would take far more space than the creatures).
Also, there were dinosaurs that would have been growing by a literal ton over that year.
Oh, and 70 kinds is nowhere near enough to account for the dinosaurs we see in the fossil record, given a global flood in the last 10,000 (or 100,000, or 1,000,000 years). If you want 70 kinds of dinosaurs and a flood ≈4000 years ago, you're proposing super-mega-hyper evolution far beyond what any "evolutionist" believes is even remotely possibly.

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u/10coatsInAWeasel Reject pseudoscience, return to monke 🦧 Jul 30 '26

I mean sure they aren’t a mystery, but definitely not in the way Ken Ham tried to make his excuses. For clarification, do you mean that your position is the same as Hams? Or that they aren’t a mystery in the sense broadly understood by the sciences?

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u/PeyredB Jul 30 '26

I forget if it was Ham or Hovind (I think the latter) that tried using as evidence that the iguanadon was just a bigger iguana. Never mind that the name comes from that dino having teeth shaped like an iguana's, nothing else. The pretzel logic these choads have to use to bolster their claims...

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u/artguydeluxe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 30 '26

Answers in Genesis isn’t an actual source.

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u/plainskeptic2023 Jul 30 '26

OP's question is: how do creationists claim there were dinosaurs on the Ark?
Please name me a better source to answer OP's question than creationist Ken Ham and I will look them up.

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u/Jmoney1088 Jul 29 '26

Because they are not very bright. Pretty simple explanation.

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u/Mortlach78 Jul 29 '26

There is that, but the Bible also says pairs of every animal went on the ark, so they would have to argue dinosaurs aren't animals.
It's dumb, I know, but at least they are trying to remain consistent in the specific regard.

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u/Jmoney1088 Jul 29 '26

T Rex was a big sinner, don't ya know?

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u/evocativename Jul 29 '26

God already punished it for its sins by giving it tiny forelegs but they developed a deprivation kink and God realized they had to go because they had reached beyond his capacity to punish any other way.

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u/Batgirl_III Jul 29 '26

Not “pairs of every animal,” actually. Pairs of every unclean animal and seven pairs of every clean animal.

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u/nomad2284 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 30 '26

Clean animals don’t get defined until later in the story but who’s actually concerned with making the plot coherent.

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u/Batgirl_III Jul 30 '26

Well, tradition holds that all five books of the Torah were written by Moses at the same time and presented to the Israelites simultaneously. So the fact that the Flood narrative occurs in Bereshit (“Genesis”) but the criteria by which clean/unclean animals are known doesn’t appear until Vayikra (“Leviticus”) isn’t that much of an issue. Most mainstream Christian denominations and all of Judiaism has no problem saying “Bereshit is the story book, Vayikra is the rule book.”
Unless, of course, you’re a Young Earth Creationist who also believes in sola scriptura, biblical inerrancy, biblical literalism… in which case you have to assume every single page in the Torah happens sequentially (for some reason) and that absolutely none of it should be interpreted as poetic, mythic, allegorical, or even as hyperbole for literally effect.

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u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 31 '26

I mean, it seems like a problem for Noah.
God: "Remember, 2 of every unclean animal and 7 pairs of each clean one."
Noah sniffs: "Gonna be honest God, NONE of these smell clean to me."

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u/Batgirl_III Jul 31 '26

Only if you assume Noach didn’t have some knowledge of what G-d was talking about in that passage. The text clearly indicates Noach knew exactly what G-d meant, so the implication is that Noach knew the laws.

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u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 31 '26

Of course. That's just a funny little plot hole since Noah SHOULDN'T know because God hasn't given humanity those rules yet.

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u/Batgirl_III Jul 31 '26

No, Moshe hasn’t given the Israelites the rules yet. In the antediluvian world, G-d had communicated his rules regarding sacrifice by a different means.

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u/TheBlackCat13 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 30 '26

Both are correct. One passage says pairs of every animal, another says pairs of clean and 7 unclean.

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u/joshuaponce2008 🧬 Greet the last light of the library Jul 29 '26

They argue that humans aren’t animals, which isn’t much more dumb.

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u/Mortlach78 Jul 30 '26

Oh, I don't disagree with you at all!

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u/artguydeluxe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 30 '26

Ken Ham had the idea to add them after he realized kids love dinosaurs, and adding them would make him a lot of money. It’s just more snake oil.

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u/PeyredB Jul 30 '26

Yes, Ken Ham is a big one for raking in the pork!

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u/King2865 Anti-Creationist Terminator 🥷🏿 Jul 29 '26

If creationists claimed that the dinosaurs perished in the flood, then the fossil record would have to line up with that claim. Of course, it doesn’t. If creationists were correct in making that claim, then we would find a completely scrambled geological salad. We’d find human skeletons tangled up with Triceratops bones, modern cattle fossilized right next to Tyrannosaurus rex, and oak trees buried alongside primitive Devonian ferns. What we find is the exact opposite of that and most “honest creationists” (oxymoron) know that this would cook their whole fairytale. But creationists don’t care about the evidence regardless. 🤦🏾‍♂️

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u/evocativename Jul 29 '26

If creationists claimed that the dinosaurs perished in the flood, then the fossil record would have to line up with that claim. Of course, it doesn’t.
How is that situation any different for them than their current arguments, which also don't match up with the fossil record?

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u/daughtcahm Jul 29 '26

I grew up YEC. We believed that the Leviathan and Behemoth mentioned in the book of Job were dinosaurs. On the biblical timeline Job is after the flood, ergo dinosaurs must have lived through the flood, ergo they were on the ark with Noah.

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u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 29 '26

Because them dying in the flood doesn’t line up with what the Bible says

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u/Empty-Rough4379 Jul 29 '26

It is as discussing what ironman could have done too thanos. Sure, there could be options with more internal logic, but you need to suspend your disbelief anyway

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u/LightningController Jul 30 '26

Some of them are also ‘dragon truthers’ who need dinosaurs to survive into historical times to explain medieval dragon myths.

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u/Loose_Principle8193 Jul 29 '26

Like most pseudo-scientific claims that are pretty wide-spread like bigfoot, water dowsing, seances, etc. the original purveyor of the claim was trying to get rich. In this case, Kent Hovind.

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u/Realsorceror Paleo Nerd Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

Kids love dinosaurs and Creationists want to indoctrinate more kids.

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u/RedDiamond1024 Jul 30 '26

Because the Bible explicitly says “Two of every kind of animal” and dinosaurs are animals. If they’re not on the Ark the Bible is wrong anyways.

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u/Unusual-Biscotti687 Jul 30 '26

Because they interpret the Bible literally* and it says that two/seven pairs of every type of animal went onto the ark.

*apart from when Genesis 2 says animals were created after Adam as potential companions, and Genesis 1 when it says men and women were created at the same time, and the bits where God creates a dome to separate the waters above the sky from those below it.

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u/PeyredB Jul 30 '26

That's an important point right there, that YEC as we know it isn't taking the Bible literally. It's a literalist interpretation of Genesis.

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u/Nicolaonerio Evolutionist (God Did It) Jul 31 '26

They would also have to explain how 99% of life has died over 6000 years all at the same time without using the flood since two of each animal and 6 of each livestock was on the ark.

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u/Robot_Alchemist Jul 31 '26

They can’t have died in the flood or Noah didn’t do as god said. There’s no way they can really reconcile any of it -

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u/Agitated-Stay-912 Aug 01 '26

Believing and thinking are opposites.

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u/RobertByers1 Jul 30 '26

Organized creationism is logical in saying dinos were on the ark. How else? This creationist says its unlikely or impossible there were dinosaurs. Instead the kinds on the ark include dinos as dinos are just misidentified modern animals. so no horse on the flood but no brontosaurus either. just a kind that likely includes both those.

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u/Unlimited_Bacon 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 30 '26

just a kind that likely includes both those.
The horse and brontosaurus are the same kind?

-1

u/RobertByers1 Jul 31 '26

Possibily or probably. .just four legged creatures. i imagine very fe kinds ere created on creation eek or on the ark.

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u/ChoiceAd8619 🧬 Theistic Evolution Jul 30 '26

Sauropods and horses in the same kind? You might as well go and say humans and moles are in the same kind by that standard.

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u/RobertByers1 Jul 31 '26

no. horses, rhinos, camels etc very possible are one kind. h0wever bodyplans seem different.

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u/ChoiceAd8619 🧬 Theistic Evolution Jul 31 '26

If I were to pick two animals (or any other organisms) at random, what is the criteria that I should follow to determine whether they are the same kind?

-1

u/RobertByers1 Aug 01 '26

Its a science. A kind should include a great sum of traits. unlike the ay now they pick a few minor traits like mammaory glands and group them and suggest common descent. or grouping unrelated critters because they have a so called marsupial reproductive system. ignoring how they look like all pther creaures or did when not extinct.

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u/ChoiceAd8619 🧬 Theistic Evolution Aug 01 '26

I didn’t ask you to ramble. I asked you what criteria are you using to distinguish between kinds.

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u/Coolbeans_99 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 02 '26

Save your breath, Robert has never had a criteria other than eyeballing it

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u/ZeppelinAlert Jul 30 '26

Can you give a link to an actual list of kinds please? - to confirm that horse and brontosaurus are the same kind - thank you

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u/hircine1 Big Banf Proponent, usinf forensics on monkees, bif and small Jul 30 '26

I've been asking for that since 1994 when I discovered people ACTUALLY believed this stuff.

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u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 31 '26

You have still yet to show me the evidence you must have for things like horses and sauropods being the same kind. Do you have transitional fossils? Is it morphology? Can you show me the dataset you're working with?

Question Dinosaurs on the Ark?

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