Now, the story of Noah’s Ark is probably the most classic Bible story ever told. It’s commonly drawn and shown to children in cartoons and colorful illustrations, but let’s face the fact that it’s a literal genocide carried out by a supposedly benevolent God. And Jews, Christians, and even Muslims all had to accept it as literal truth for millennia. But in the age of reason, many have come to realize the story couldn’t possibly be real, for a number of reasons. Honestly, I don’t just consider this opinion. I believe treating Noah’s Ark as literal truth is a form of mental illness, even if for some it’s more psychosomatic.

Let’s look at it from a historical angle. Roughly 1,000 to 1,500 years before the Torah was written down, there existed the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Sumerian tale. In it, a character named Utnapishtim lives out essentially the same story as Noah, though some of the mythology, like the gods and certain circumstances, differs somewhat. Basically, his god commanded him to build a boat to survive a global flood. The odds of the Israelites writing their version without borrowing from the Epic of Gilgamesh are next to impossible. If it smells like plagiarism, it’s almost certainly literary theft.

But let’s go back to the Bible itself. According to Judeo-Christian mythology, Noah was somewhere between 500 and 600 years old when he built the ark. First of all, nobody lives that long. And I know he had his family helping him, but it’s remarkable that Noah and his family managed to build a boat gigantic enough to house every single animal on Earth, times two. As a 38-year-old man, I don’t even enjoy mowing the grass when it’s hot outside. The story says he needed a male and a female of each animal. And according to biblical scholars, the ark wasn’t even close to the size of the Titanic. The Titanic could comfortably carry about 4,000 passengers at best. There are currently around 8 million different animal species living on Earth today, not even counting extinct ones. Even packing it wall to wall, Noah’s Ark wouldn’t fit a fraction of that number.

Now let’s talk practicality. The idea of gathering animals two by two makes sense to children, but to anyone who actually understands animals and geography, it gets more absurd the more you think about it. How did Noah, living somewhere near Judea, manage to gather every animal on Earth? He got polar bears from the Arctic, penguins from Antarctica, and animals from the Western Hemisphere, a place the ancient world didn’t even know existed. And how exactly did Noah tell the difference between genders in some of these animals? Species like sea turtles and flamingos require scientific testing to determine sex, unless you’re willing to wait around forever to watch one give birth, and even that only confirms which one was female. So Noah would essentially be flipping a coin. And some animals reproduce asexually without a partner at all, so did he bring two of those, or just one, and how would he have known?

There’s also a debate among creationists, not so much an old-Earth versus young-Earth debate, but over whether dinosaurs were on the ark at all. And yet somehow dinosaurs vanished as a single group, especially since creationists don’t count birds as dinosaurs, while animals like mice, chickens, and the dodo managed to survive and keep reproducing. And here’s another problem: many species don’t handle inbreeding well. With only two founding pairs, you’d be looking at a genetic disaster with zero diversity to draw from.

Biblical tradition also holds that all the animals eventually left the ark and spread out to other parts of the world, either on their own or with human help. But how exactly would they have reached places like Australia, Hawaii, New Zealand, Antarctica, or the Americas? Are we supposed to believe two kangaroos hopped all the way from Mount Ararat in Turkey and somehow leapt thousands of miles across the Indian Ocean into Australia, with every marsupial coincidentally following the same route? And somehow horses never made it to the Americas, which makes whoever traveled there look pretty careless for leaving them behind.

The Bible clearly states that the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, an actual mountain in present-day Turkey. And despite a few hoaxes from Christian groups claiming to have found it, there’s no real evidence of the boat up there. And let’s say, hypothetically, the boat actually landed on a different mountain due to a translation error. Don’t you think someone scanning Google Maps would have spotted it by now? It’s also worth noting the Bible claims the floodwaters rose above the highest mountain on Earth, which would be Mount Everest, where the air is too thin to breathe. I imagine plenty of animals today simply couldn’t survive that kind of altitude.

Then there’s the fact that no land plants could have survived a flood lasting more than a few days, even though if God wanted to drown humanity, it would have only taken about 30 minutes at most. And since everyone left in the world would have been incestuous descendants of Adam and Eve, humanity essentially had to repeat the same process all over again with Noah and his family. Just look at the House of Habsburg. It doesn’t take long for inbreeding to seriously damage a family line. I do believe whoever came up with this story, or the one it was based on, was likely inspired by some real flood that devastated a specific region at some point. But the notion that the entire planet was submerged in water, and that rainbows are God’s personal promise not to drown everyone again, is some of the most absurd nonsense no reasonable adult should take literally. And yet millions of Christians, Jews, and Muslims around the world believe this happened exactly as written, not as some kind of loosely interpreted dumb metaphor.