By Sally Morem
10. Bull Durham. That pitcher was a jerk. So was Noah in this story. He gets drunk, then blames his son for looking in on him at the wrong time. Are we really supposed to believe he was a righteous man of his generation?
9. Animal House. Noah, the Cruise Director, would find it impossible to keep predators and prey apart. I can barely hold back my dog when she sees the neighbor dog she hates.
8. Soylent Green. An overcrowded environment with no food supply is a recipe for disaster. Mark Twain wrote a marvelous essay explaining what would be involved if Noah had followed 19th century American animal shipping regulations. Let’s put it this way: As an Ark, even a late-20th century nuclear-powered aircraft carrier wouldn’t have been nearly large enough to do the job.
7. “Have you taken a look at what’s down there lately?” Bill Cosby said it all. Nothing more need be said.
6. Evolve, Evolve as Fast as You Can. Since no sea vessel of any reasonable size could hold but a fraction of the millions of today’s known land-based animal species, any survivors of the Ark’s voyage would have to speciate enormously faster than any professional evolutionist would be foolhardy enough to predict.
5. The World is Black, the World is White. Likewise, the descendants of Noah would have had to migrate throughout the world and racially differentiate in a few short thousands of years. Racists who spotted this little glitch in this story have had a field day with it. They assured their followers this mean that the Bible says members of non-white races couldn’t be human.
4. “Mosquitoes (Male or Female?)…” Noah and his family would have had to have a far deeper and more broad-based anatomical knowledge of the many Ark-bound species than any modern day biologist possesses in order to select the requisite sexual pairs for the voyage.
3. “Only Two Rabbits, Only Two…” The more fecund species would be reproducing themselves during preparations and the voyage itself. Yet another overwhelming strain on extremely limited resources.
2. Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Rainbows aren’t messages from above; they’re evidence of the existence of a spectrum of colors in pure sunlight. You don’t need raindrops in the air to experience this phenomenon. Just hold a cut glass goblet up to the window on a clear day.
1. Waterworld. Kevin Costner got this main premise wrong, too. There aren’t enough water molecules in the world to inundate Minnesota, let alone the Himalayas. No worldwide flood is possible.