The weird business of trying to materialize myths #1 - Noah's Ark

by Graham Email

One of the enduring Christian stories from the Old Testament is the story of Noah and his Ark, and how he supposedly saved many representatives of the animal kingdom from a catastrophic flood.
Today, despite the reality that over 5000 years have elapsed (according to Biblical timetables) since the Ark would have been floating around, there is no shortage of people still looking for it. The latest is a former Baywatch actress who has apparently been out in Eastern Turkey looking for the Ark (although, in a true CYA move that shows she has potential for elective office, she is at pains to say that she is "just looking" and does not expect to find it).
The definitive sardonic statement on this nonsensical endeavour comes here:

Using telescopes, astronomers can locate and identify asteroids as small as ten metres long, despite the rocks travelling at tens of thousands of kilometres per hour, at a distance of at least three hundred million kilometres from Earth.
Meanwhile, the religious cannot find a 200 metre boat on a 5000 metre high mountain in a fixed location. Maybe goblins are moving the wreckage around the mountain when people try to look.
Just how dim are people that they can’t grasp the non-existence of the “ark”?

Another commenter in the same thread has a very good point, presumably forgotten by would-be discoverers:

The most pragmatic and sensible pro-flood answer is one I generally don’t hear from flood theorists: That Noah and family cannibalized the ark after landing. Wood is a valuable commodity, and the ark presumably already had much of its wood already in plank and beam forms. Heck, even rotten wood would probably make decent firewood, so it’d still find a use. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make for good TV ratings.