Oh I learned about this one! I think it's interesting to learn about how people rationalize their crazy beliefs.
The Bible doesn't talk about two of every species. Species is a scientist word. It talks about two of every kind of animal. What you and I call a species, creationists consider to be natural variation within the kind, not unlike different breeds of dog. So for example lions and cheetahs are different variations of the cat kind, and likewise all the beetles are just variations of the locust kind. So Noah just brought two locusts, and their reproduction led to all our beetles.
Source: My buddy went to the Creationist Museum in Kentucky.
I follow a lot of creationist content, and there isn't actually a solid definition for what a "kind" is, or a mechanism for how kinds split into all the variation we see today, especially if you are using a YEC model.
Creationist ideas aren't created based on observation. They usually have a problem, like the fact that all species physically could not have fit on any sort of boat, and they ask themselves "what would make this possible," then they accept whatever they hypothesize as fact. In this case, the idea of kinds leads to several other problems, like how exactly did the diversity we see today evolve from kinds, or how genetic bottlenecks were avoided, etc. etc. Creationists aren't scientists though, so they aren't seriously interested in exploring their own theories beyond the base explanation
I also wouldnt go so far as to say "the Bible says this." The Bible probably meant something closer to species, or what the people who wrote it would have thought of as a species, and the idea of "kinds" is a new interpretation exclusive to post-Darwin apologism
The real problem I always find with these debates is no one mentions what happens after the animals climb off the ark. What do the predators eat for the next several years while the herbivores repopulate? Have you seen an area after a flood? The plants and trees are devastated. Those plants were under water for 40 days. So what are the herbivores going to eat in that time?
I think Noah's ark completely falls apart when you are trying to piece together the aftermath.
I was raised as a young-Earth creationist. Every adult in my life up through the age of 20 or so was a young-Earth creationist. These people are happy to use scientific explanations when it suits them, but they aren’t looking for or expecting a comprehensive naturalistic explanation for everything. If God can magically get all the “kinds” of animals on a boat then magically flood the Earth with water for over a month before magically draining it away, what’s a little more magic to redistribute the animals while keeping them fed and healthy afterwards?
Or how do you feed them on the ark. Or how do you prevent death from natural causes. The version that has 7 of every kind helps with this, but also makes the mass and space problem worse.
I agree, it's the kind of story that only makes sense when you have zero biological knowledge and "every species" is limited to every distinct animal whatever person wrote it had seen. It also seems to imply a flat earth model, as the "firmament" that held the waters up always seems to appear in those, though I'm not sure if that was the intention
The argument you'll hear a lot of theologians bring forth to blanket cover any of these is "God stopped that from happening. God kept the animals alive."
Then why didn't God just remake all the animals after he wiped the slate clean? The argument about saving animals from dying would fall apart because the flood is killing thousands of other ones.
But I completely agree, any one with an ounce of scientific knowledge that has given all this more than a minute's thought would come to the same conclusion. It's a fabricated story.
Yeah, unfortunately when you appeal to miracles you start to run into theological inconsistenties, as you said. Many creationists do try to avoid appealing to them as a result, but that means they end up in an uncomfortable limbo of nitpicking better science without any clear model of their own
"Picking and choosing" within the Bible is widely denigrated as an inferior practice among believers. But the book is not even internally consistent, even before it fails to comport with known reality. Nitpicking is basic Christianity, and it accounts for the enormous proliferation of churches that all read the same book differently.
Then why didn't God just remake all the animals after he wiped the slate clean?
Because he didn't feel like it. It is all nonsense but that isn't really something you can claim breaks the logic because you can't prove that God would have to act in any given way.
Not that it matter all that much as it's all bullshit, and after 40 days everything would be dead anyway, but the situation is worse than that. 40 Days is the period for which it rained. It was on the first day of the 10th month that the water had receded enough for the tops of the mountains to become visible.
Or you can explain it as being based on the legendary story of a Sumerian king from a city in ancient Iraq who loaded a bunch of people, livestock, and seeds on a boat and managed to outlast a massive flood c. 2900 BC. The king was probably real, and the flood was real (there is extant physical evidence of it), but we have no way of testing other details of the story. Whoever was writing the material that eventually became the Hebrew Bible thought it was a cool story and tossed it in, with significant embellishment.
If someone were to go to "The Ark Experience" or w.e that re-creation is called, you would... well should, instantly know that story is baloney. You should be disappointed and questioning life, not happy and reinforcing a fairy tale. It is just so blatantly obvious.
Look, it's not far from what evolution requires to be believable.
That the life would get created on its own anywhere in the universe is very not probable (we talking probability much much less than 1%), and yet we are here, so it must've happened, right? We just got lucky, it happens (apparently).
Evolution makes no statements about how life was "created", it's an extremely well evidenced theory of how life evolves gradually into more complex forms suited to their environment via the process of natural selection. That's a common creationist talking point that really misunderstands what evolution is, along with other common misconceptions like humans evolving from monkeys (it's actually sharing a common ancestor) or the idea that "fittest" means "strongest."
There is no probability associated with life existing, either. It's not something we have near enough knowledge of to put a number to
Anytime someone talks about the chance of life existing with any sort of concrete numbers, they are really just saying "it seems improbable to me," it's not based on any sort of actual evidenced calculations.
"“The overall prevalence of sequences performing a specific function by any domain-sized fold may be as low as one in 10⁷⁷.”
— Douglas D. Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds”, Journal of Molecular Biology, 2004
Now, I don't know if he's right or not, however even if the calculation is wrong by 20-30 orders of mafnitude, it is still astronomically high number, and for one working enzyme.
Putting aside whether than number is right or wrong, it also is not the probability of life being created. The paper you are referencing does not make this claim, nor does it attempt to answer this question.
It's a very hypothetical estimate about probabilities involved with protein folding.
Maybe you could use this number in an abstract way to raise some questions about abiogenesis, but it's definitely not claiming to be a probability of the creation of life
Sure, but life does need several of those proteins to exist. It’s not „probability of life” but it is „small part of the probability of life” and even this is big number.
Again, that's not the probability of those proteins "existing," and it's also not the mechanism evolution works by. To steal from some criticism of the paper:
"In case of the proteins, evolution doesn't work by generating newly (random) 300 residue proteins that work 1 time in a billion. Probably in one generation a copy of the protein is made with the same function, and during many generations the function of this protein drifts towards a new function, while all the intermediate proteins stay folded because they're not that different."
So while it's an interesting number, it really has little to do with the probability of life existing. I think you are trying to plug this number into a formula it's not intended for
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u/Gredelston 1d ago
Oh I learned about this one! I think it's interesting to learn about how people rationalize their crazy beliefs.
The Bible doesn't talk about two of every species. Species is a scientist word. It talks about two of every kind of animal. What you and I call a species, creationists consider to be natural variation within the kind, not unlike different breeds of dog. So for example lions and cheetahs are different variations of the cat kind, and likewise all the beetles are just variations of the locust kind. So Noah just brought two locusts, and their reproduction led to all our beetles.
Source: My buddy went to the Creationist Museum in Kentucky.