OK... here is what I wrote when this topic came up before (no need to expend energy coming up with new responses to the same-old):
Bison are clean, meaning, according to some, that 7 pair of them were to be on the ark. According to the Wiki, "...European bison can weigh from 800 to 1,000 kg (1,800 to 2,200 lb)." Lets go with an average - 2000 lb.
Just the 7 pair of the bison kind represent about
28,000 lbs of bison. The Wiki tells us that "
European bison feed predominantly on grasses... an adult male
can consume 32 kg of food in a day." Creation dot com claims they were on the ark for
364 days.(not the 375 JW does - and yes, I am aware of the wiggles that the YECs use - they could have been babies, blah blah blah - not buying it - none of that is stated in Genesis).
So, just for the bison, 600 year old Noah (I read somewhere that those ages are actually months, which would be more reality-based, putting Noah at 50 when he built the ark) had to load some 3.5 million Kg of food - 8 million pounds of food. I found various estimates for water consumption - let's say 10 gallons/day. About 50,000 gallons. Now, one will be tempted to claim that it was raining for 40 days, so they didn't need to store water!
Ok, but what about the 324 days they were on the ark and it
wasn't raining?
Bottom line, just for the Bison-Kind, we need space for
them (~10 feet long, ~4 feet wide) 40 sqft/bison - 560 square feet for the Bison Kind (that is if they were packed like sardines; also, ~6 feet tall, so ~3300 cubic feet).
Now back to that food and water - a gallon of water takes up about 0.13 cubic feet, so 6500 cubic feet of water.
For the food, for simplicity I will use a bale of hay as a reference - I found on the webs that "The
dimension of a small bale held together by three strings is approximately 16” high x 22” wide x 44” long and usually weighs 100lbs. " - so, 8 million/100 = 80,000 bales, at 16x22x44 hay bale size = ~10 cubic feet = 800,000 cubic feet.
So, 800,000+6500+560 =
807,060 cubic feet JUST FOR BISON-KIND.
According to biblestudy.org, the total volume of the ark was
1.5 million cubic feet - using an 18 inch cubit. AIG prefers a 20.4 inch cubit -
I will just pad the volume up to, say, 1.8 million cubic feet.
But that is just open space - the ark had 3 floors, and you would need internal bracing, ramps/stairways, enclosures, etc. - all of which take up space. None of the ark size estimates I came across even mentioned any of that - but let's say all that accounts for, say 70,000 cubic feet -
so we are back down to about 1.73 million cubic feet.
So, 1.73 million cubic feet total usable ark volume - 807,000 cubic feet for animal, food, water storage for the bison kind =
923,000 cubic feet left...
That is,
almost HALF of the entire internal volume of the ark is needed JUST to fit in the bison and its food and water!
Then we have cattle - 14 of them.
Deer - 14 of them.
Elk, moose, reindeer - 14 each of them.
And the elephant Kind? Just 1 of them (but to account for all of the Elephantids, gomphotheres and such - that will require a good amount of post-flood macroevolution!), but they are bigger and eat more than any of the above.
And dinosaurs - 1 seismosaurus kind and the ark is keel-up..
Bottom line - it really does not matter one hoot if the ark could have floated on paper, or even in real life -
it could not possibly have held all it needed to by virtue of Jehovah's command to bring living creatures “of every sort of flesh, two of each" or 7 pairs of clean animals, no matter what the smaller ones were.
Even if I omit the water storage and arbitrarily half the amount of space needed for the Bison-Kind, this is DEVASTATING for a reality-based ark tale.
The creationist is forced to remove themselves from the arena of mere plausibility of the ark floating, and rely 100% on God magic to make their tale possible, and thus, creationism is NOT reality-based, or scientific.
Oh - and a question - why are these critters "abominations"? Didn't Jehovah create them? Why did Jehovah create abominations?
Deuteronomy 14:1-29
“You are the sons of the Lord your God. You shall not cut yourselves or make any baldness on your foreheads for the dead. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.
“You shall not eat any abomination. These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, the deer, the gazelle, the roebuck, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope, and the mountain sheep. ...
ADDENDUM: I just realized I made a math error - a bale of hay is closer to 8.6 cubic feet, not 10 - I don't feel like re-doing all the calculations, but I also don't think it really matters - even if the result is that the Bison-Kind, their food and water only take up 1/4 of the ark, it STILL shows, when one considers all of the other large mammal-Kinds that need to be accommodated, that the ark story CANNOT actually do what it is described as having done, whether it 'floats' or not.