Were there koalas on the Ark?

I recently wrote an article about how some critics attack the Flood event with arguments like, “There's no way Noah could care for that many animals.” This is a textbook example of an appeal to ignorance fallacy. That is, “I don't know how this could be done, therefore, it can't be done.” I shared the article on FakeBook where a troll by the name of Charles [allegedly a Christian] took exception to it. Actually, he barely addressed my point and quickly went off the rails with insults and red herrings. Such is the habit of trolls.

Proverbs 26:4 says, “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.” In other words, don't fall for a troll's trap and chase his red herrings. Instead I followed the advice of Proverbs 26:5, “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.” I pointed out that he wasn't addressing my point and tried to move the discussion back on track. Of course, he would have none of it and continued his foolish rant, which ultimately led to him spouting this little gem:

I wonder, sometimes, what gives trolls their thrill. Do they think they're really making good points? Or is the fun just spouting nonsense, hoping to get a reaction from people? //RKBentley scratches his head.// Any way, I've heard this point before. In fact, I've heard it many times before. More than 10 years ago, in an apologetics forum I used to frequent, a skeptic named LeszekUK made almost exactly the same point:

Here is a puzzle for the Creos. (It works for pandas and bamboo, as well!) Koalas eat only eucalyptus leaves yet the myth of Noah's Ark claims that all the animals came on board, two by two, male and female... So how did these koalas manage to make it across continents and oceans, all the way from Australia to the Middle East, when all their food stayed in Australia? Aside from the problem of how one koala pair knew they had to make it to the Ark, how did they manage to make the crossing? Swimming and starving? Did Noah travel to Australia first to gather up eucalyptus leaves? Even worse for Creos, when the Ark came to rest on Mt Ararat, once all the vegetation had been drowned, how, exactly, did they make it back whence they came?

Wow! Are they reading from the same playbook or something? I sometimes wonder if critics ever have an original thought. They seem to simply repeat the same criticisms over and over again, ignoring any rebuttal they might hear. See canard. The problems with this argument are varied and I'm going to try to address each one in order.

First, it's a misnomer that koalas only eat eucalyptus leaves. One source says, “Different species of eucalypts grow in different parts of Australia, so a koala in Victoria would have a very different diet from one in Queensland. Koalas like a change, too, and sometimes they will eat from other trees such as wattle or tea tree.” This isn't a trivial point. LeszekUK's argument hinges on the premise that koalas eat only eucalyptus leaves. If they can, in fact, eat other things, it immediately undermine his whole point. Note that LeszekUK also said, It works for pandas and bamboo, as well! I intend to leverage that in a moment.

Second, the present distribution of animals throughout the world is merely that – their present distribution. We can't say with certainty where koalas lived prior to Flood. Marsupial fossils are found on every continent, by the way. But here's an obvious factoid that seems to have gone completely over the heads of Charles and LeszekUK: neither do we know where Noah lived prior to the Flood! Why do they assume Koalas had to swim from Australia to the Middle East before the Flood? For all we know, Koalas lived in Noah's backyard eating the leaves of whatever trees grew there!

Next, after the Flood, animals didn't have to make it back [to] whence they came. The fact of the matter is, the environments where they lived before no longer existed. It was a new world and animals had to find new environments to occupy. The only rule was to adapt or die. Keep this in mind while I go back to the point about panda bears.

https://unsplash.com/@tbs44

Bears are a little different than koalas because they are more diverse and us Western folks are more familiar with bears. Pandas eat almost nothing but bamboo. However, we know that their cousins eat a variety of things. Polar bears, for example, almost exclusive eat seals. Black bears eat nearly anything: roots, berries, meat, fish, insects, larvae, and grass. Where Charles and LeszekUK go wrong on this point is that they believe the modern species were exactly the same as the ancestral pairs Noah had on the Ark. He didn't have panda bears on the Ark. He had two representatives of the bear (ursa) kind. Those bears ate whatever bears ate then. When bears left the Ark and made their way across the world, they began to adapt to whatever environment they found themselves. Natural selection did her work and, over many generations, the various species of bears we have now were formed.

Can you see where I'm going with this? Put another way, there were no pandas before the Flood. There were no koalas before the Flood. Noah had the ancestors of these critters and it's foolish to insist that the ancestors had exactly the same environmental/dietary restrictions that their modern descendants have. Jeez!

This criticism is a mile wide and an inch deep. It's a straw man and, when skeptics use it, it merely demonstrates the limited understanding they have of the Flood account. They repeat it because they don't understand it.