This story has so many problems with it, it's difficult to know where to begin. To simplify, I will not be focusing on other cultures earlier flood myths, which probably influenced the creation of the biblical flood myth. Neither will I be focusing on God's own imperfection (or incompetence), as his Creation had some major design flaws forcing him to essentially reboot Creation over again. I also won't delve into the implausibility of rapid repopulation over a short time after the flood either. So here are some problems with the Flood story:
1.
The sheer number of animals that had to be aboard the Ark : For this, I'm going to assume that the animals on the ark were all land animals. According to the
California Academy of Sciences, there are approximately 6.5 million species of land animals. I'll be conservative and round down to 6 million, give or take a million. Since we have two of every animal, the ark must be capable of holding and supporting
12 MILLION animals for an extended duration, without additional support. That alone makes the Flood story quite implausible (even more so if one includes dinosaurs as passengers). Anyone who has been in a pet store will know housing many animals takes up quite a lot of space and resources. To put that into perspective, a single adult elephant (the largest land mammal in the world) can weigh upwards of 14,000 pounds, grow up to 35 feet long, and eat 200-600 pounds of food and drink 50 gallons of water PER DAY! And Noah had 12 million animals to feed and water daily, which is an impossible task for the relatively few people aboard the ark (never mind cleaning up after the animals too). In addition, it is supposed to believed that many of those animals traveled thousands of miles, some over the ocean, and from remote places like Antarctica, outside of their natural environments and ecosystems, in time to board the ark before the flood. Really?