Is the Hills' flood possible?

My June copy of the ASA came about a week before I left Beijing and I didn't have
time to read the articles by Carol and Alan Hill. Since the flood is my area of
interest and since I had had a debate here on this list about this upcoming
article, I was eager to see what the solution was.

I won't claim to be as good a physicist as I used to be, but I took a hard look at
this and have several questions which are left unanswered by the article. Maybe I
am wrong, but I would like to hear critiques of my critique.

And I know that few listen to me in my campaign to try to tighten up the logic of
Christian apologetics, but one must never give up, so here goes a critique of the
most popular flood speculation around, the Mesopotamian flood. I do wish people
would finally realize that they need a new theory rather than the same ol stuff for
200 years.

Hill calculates that the six side of the ark would require 65,000 cubic feet of
cedar wood which he says would weigh 2 million pounds. This is 6 inch thick
cedar. When I multiply the areas I get 57,375 cubic feet, not the 65,000 cubic
feet he cites. But, that is only for the 6 sides. I can't see where he calculates
the weight for the 2 floors internal to the ark. Here are my values which are a bit
different from his.

Super.structure
45……tall
450…..long…..1518750…cubic.feet.in.ark
75……wide

3375…sq.feet.front
3375…sq.feet.back
33750..sq.feet.top
33750..sq.feet.bottom
20250..sq.feet.port.side
20250..sq.feet.starboard.side
33750..floor.1……………..He.didn't.count.the.floors
33750..floor.2
182250……..total.surface.area 57375
91125…..Total.volume.of.wood cf…. .5.ft.thick

31.2135……lb/cf.of.cedar

2,844,330……..lbs.for.floors.and.walls

Now, let's look at the water. Hill's table 1 says that the average animal weight
is 250 lbs. I looked up how much a pig (similar weight) eats and drinks each day.
It seems that animals between 100 and 500 lbs eat about 3.5% of their weight each
day.

0.035……percentage of weight eaten each day.
1250000…..total weight lb of animals
43750……..daily food weight lb
15,968,750...yearly food weight lb

Hill says they only need 2.5 million pounds of food. I think he would starve the
poor critters---call PETA! The reality is that the smaller animals, which are more
numerous eat a higher percentage of their weight per day. Since numerically they
are more, this would be a somewhat conservative number.

Hill says that the ark took pairs of 2500 species, but I fail to see why that was
necessary. There are only 4000 species of mammals on earth and why he needs to
hauls such a large number is beyond me if Iraq was the only thing flooded.

For water, I looked at the water intake of pigs--about 2 gallons per day.

Pig water intake http://www.aces.uiuc.edu/archives/experts/swine/0064.html
2...........gallons per day/animal
0.266.......cf/day/animal
16.52392....lbs water per animal per day
21,728,955..total water needed lb

Now, Hill says that the animals need 1 million pounds of water to keep them going
263 days. That is what I calculated above. Once again, if the same mass of smaller
animals is there, the daily water use per pound is higher. ONce again, Hill would
torment the poor animals.

Now, what does this do for the total weight of the ark? Hill claims that the toal
weight of the ark is 10 million pounds giving it a draught of 5 feet. There are
problems with this, because the way I calculate this (equidistribution of the load
on 3 floors), the center of gravity of the ark would be something like 10 feet
above the waterline making the ark subject to rolling over and over, especially if
the ark got broadside to the 80 mph winds Hill wants for so long (another problem
discussed later).

In the appendix, Hill defines that he is using the front and rear surface area for
moving the ark. However, this is one of those theoretical ivory tower assumptions.
It assumes that the ark never gets broadside to the wind direction. This is an
incredibly unlikely scenario. If the ark gets broadside to the wind and water flow,
it would tilt up because the water would push south and the wind blowing north
would create a torque on the ark making it want to tilt. As it tilts, the food,
water and other loose flotsom inside the ark will re-distribute and accelerate the
roll. As the ark tilts, the torque of the water and air flow will get stronger
because there is a bigger area across which the force/unit area can work. While I
haven't calculated the forces, I think this is a real weak point for this theory.
Noah and company would roll their way to Turkey.

I have taken cruises on ocean ships and they are quite pleasant. But I would never
want to be on one that had the center of gravity significantly above the waterline
as this ark would be if it were as Hill describes it. Maybe Allan has more faith
than I in such a situation.

But my weight calculation for the ark shows he needs 45 million pounds of weight to
avoid mistreating the animals.

2,844,330.......lbs for floors and walls changed from Hill's figure
2,000,000.......braces
1,000,000.......cages
1,250,000.......animals
15,968,750......food changed from Hill's figure
21,728,955......water changed from Hill's figure
...250,000......humans fixin's

45,042,035.......total weight for the ark

If his line called braces, includes the flooring, then remove 800,000 lbs from the
above figure, but it won't make much difference.

This makes the ark have a 21 ft draught and this then makes the corresponding
windspeed needed to push the ark north even higher than the quite unlikely values
Hill already uses.

Now lets look at the wind and rain. Apparently the Hills are thinking of
hurricanes, which don't happen in the Persian Gulf (minor problem there). Alan Hill
says, "Althought more formidable winds are required to move a 20 million-pound ark
(with a correspondingly smaller draft) upstream, even these winds fall well within
the range of a great hurricane." Alan E. Hill, Quantitative Hydrology of NOah's
Flood," Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Vol 58(2006):2, p. 138

But even that weight of an ark would carry insufficient food and water.

All I can say is that these New Mexican residents have never actually seen a
hurricane and are unaware that they require open ocean. Land near the eye results
in a weakening of the storm system, but never mind this, and never mind that the in
Quaternary history to our knowledge, there has never been such a storm in the
Persian Gulf which has too little.

Once again, no one in this article (or any other article on the Mesopotamian flood
tells us where the flood sediments are. Carol Hill argues that YEC is wrong
because there is no evidence for global flood sediment but she herself does not
tell us where the flood sediments are in the upper reaches of the Tigris river
basin. What she does is explain why the sediments AREN'T found, which is an
entirely different game.

"A popular misconception is that a great inundation such as Noah's Flood should
have left a widespread layer of sediment all over Mesopotamia. If flood deposits
occur at Shuruppak (Fara), then why not at nearby Kish? Why have no flood deposits
been found at Ur that correspond to NOah's Flood, and why in the city-mound of Ur
do some pits contain thick flood deposits while other pits nearby contain no flood
deposits?"
     "This presumed problematic situation is completely understandable to
hydrologists--in fact, it is what they expect. Flood erode sediment as well as
deposit sediment." Carol A. HIll, Qualitative Hydrology of NOah's Flood,
Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 58(2006):2, ,p. 126

When I get my computer back this week (it is on its way home from Beijing), I will
post a picture again showing the lack of widespread Quaternary fluvial sediment in
the northern part of the Tigris basin?

OK, they have lots of rainfall pouring into the basin. It would bring with it lots
of sediment in suspension. It should, even in Northern Iraq, find backwater places
where it can settle out, but this sediment isn't there either. On Page 127 Carol
says that one could expect to see 50 feet of sediment from this year long event in
the backwaters. Well, there would be backwaters in northern Iraq well away from
the river's channel yet the Quaternary riverine sediments are not found much more
than 10 miles away from the present river channel. This argues persuasively that
there was no widespread water being blown up to the north, nor was that basin
flooded. Carol, where is any evidence of quaternary fluviatile sediments away from
the actual river channel itself?

It is quite convenient that the flood deposited and then eroded all sedimentary
evidence of itself.

In looking at the equations in the back of the article, on page 141 Alan Hill has 4
equations Equation 18 is

windwork=viscuswork +liftwork

This means that all these terms must have the same units. Well, Equation 15 has

windwork = .5 x [rho] x f x [wv(t)-Vship]^2 x S1

Where f is defined in equation 19 and is dimensionless, S1 is an area wv(t) is wind
velocity, Vship is self-explanatory.

But equation 16 has viscuswork having different units if I am reading this right.

Viscuswork = .5 x c x [rho] x (Vship-(-vel[t])^2 x Vship x S2

C is the coefficient of drag and those often are mass/time but maybe this is a
dimensionless form of the number. I will let that one go. But this equation has
V^3 and the previous equation has V^2. The units are not the same as near as I can
tell.

Illogic like some of the things I see here is what I would like to see Christian
apologetics move away from. We need to think through all the issues, and I am not
entirely sure that that happens when apologetical systems are put together.

As far as I can see this is another sunken voyage of the ark, that doesn't concord
to any reality at all. I suspect I will hear soon from Phil Metzger.

        
Received on Sun Jun 4 09:57:58 2006