Ark Encounters of the Absurd Kind

With the opening of Ark Encounter, the so-called life-sized replica of Noah's Ark, opening in Williamston, Kentucky, USA, I have been made privy to a few photographs from an unnamed source, which I have the pleasure in sharing with you here.

Right off, let me begin by saying that Ark Encounter is not a replica of Noah's Ark. It is in fact a building mocked-up to look like a boat on one side. Ark Encounter are very fond to show off the side which looks like a boat in their publicity shots. They are more than just a wee bit shy of showing the other side, which is a prefabricated concrete building, consisting of three towers, which the attraction is 'leaning' against and which houses all the facilities (restrooms, elevators, air conditioning, ventilation ducts, emergency exits, etc) for the 'Ark'. They are not too fond either of stating that the entire thing is embedded in solid concrete to keep it upright. Oh, or that there are no actual live animals in the Ark, as animal welfare legislation forbade it. The only live animals are in fact in a petting zoo, on the other side of a hill from the Ark.

Ark Encounter is headed up by Ken Ham, founder of the Creationist Museum and Answers in Genesis (AiG), who are behind the tourist attraction. Ham, an Australian immigrant to the USA, is a Biblical literalist and Young Earth Creationist (YEC) who honestly believes that the account of the creation of the Earth as laid down in the Bible is literally true, and holds by Archbishop Ussher's calculations, that the Earth was created in six days, approximately 6000 years ago. As such, I expected the worst from Ark Encounter, and I am only too sad to say I have not been disappointed. The attraction defies most if not all of peer-reviewed accepted science, as well as history, without a shred of solid evidence to back up it's claims.

The first photograph shows the Earth as imagined before the flood, with what I presume are supposed to be Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden – looking over towards very poor representations of apatosaurs and what I take to be pteradons. Pteradons were of course carnivorous, but notice that Ark Encounter have chosen herbivore land-based dinosaurs in this illustration. Perhaps the presence of carnivorous dinosaurs such as tyrannosaurus rex would raise too many questions from visitors. Whatever, unfortunately for Ham et al, not only did both species die out millennia before the rise of mankind, they did not even live together; the apatosaurs lived 152-151 million years ago, while pteradons lived 86-80 million years ago.

Bringing in the “wickedness” of mankind, there is mention of the Tower of Babel, which the Bible has rising “to Heaven”, and the next photograph shows “Towers from around the world”, asking if various ancient structures from around the world give a clue to what the Tower of Babel may have looked like. The Tower of Babel myth in fact completely throws creationists timescales, as well as their exaggerations about it reaching heaven. Scholars have identified it with the Great Ziggurat of Babylon or “Etemenanki”, a tower dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Marduk by Nabopolassar, king of Babylonia. The Etemenanki was 300 feet (91 metres) high, and rather embarrassingly for Ark Encounter, was built c.610 BCE. So, not only not old enough, but not nearly high enough, and much shorter than many older structures; notably the Great Pyramid of Giza, which was completed 2580 BCE, originally stood 481 feet (146.5 metres) high, and which the Bible makes absolutely no mention of.

I also don't think the Irish are going to be too happy about an illustration of the Newgrange pyramid being pointed to the south-west of England.

The next photograph is of a panel arguing that mankind had the technology to work wood, stone and metal at the alleged time of Noah, approximately 4400 years ago. “Many people believe that ancient man was not intelligent enough to design and build something as large and complex as the ark”, states the panel. Nope. Never once claimed that. In fact, our ancestors, having the same brain capacity as we have, had the potential to design and build fantastic structures, as ancient wonders such as the pyramids at Giza are monument to. They merely lacked knowledge, and of course the sharing of knowledge made our species more intelligent.

The Ark however is no Egyptian pyramid, and given the description in the Bible, it is actually not a very good design. For a start, a wooden vessel of that size, despite the claims of Ken Ham, would not float for any length of time before either turning turtle, breaking her back, or both. The longest wooden ship ever built was the Wyoming, a six-masted schooner which measured 450 feet (140 metres) and which was launched in 1909. Due to her length she buckled and timbers warped at sea, and had to have pumps working constantly to keep her hold relatively free of water. She foundered in heavy seas in 1924 with the loss of all hands. Compare the Wyoming to the supposed length of the Ark; 520 feet 8 inches, and you soon see that there is no way she could be seaworthy. Some will argue that with plenty of cross-bracing, it may be possible. I would immediately counter yes, but if you add cross-bracing, you are going to lose room for storage, and add to the overall weight of the vessel. So, less room for animals and their feed, and more weight before you even bring elephants, mastodons, larger dinosaurs, etc, aboard. If it ever existed, then no wonder nobody else got on the Ark apart from Noah's family; nobody else would be insane enough to set foot on that ruddy death trap.

But even assuming it could float, there is the time it would take to build the Ark. Answers in Genesis gives an estimate of 20 years, and goes on to say that this is a “tentative” figure. Fair enough, but that would have Noah, already an old man, and his three sons working on it alone (in Jewish patriarchal society, the wives of Noah and his son would not work upon it), with no prior experience, with primitive tools, materials, and building methods. It has taken Ark Encounter over 5½ years, with highly-trained and experienced construction teams (exact number employed unknown – can anyone help?), using modern building techniques and machinery, as well as modern materials, to build half a replica Ark. If construction experts could not build a whole one with modern means in one quarter of the time AiG claims, then what are the chances of four novices, one of whom was an old man, building the original in the 20 years allotted, using primitive tools, techniques and materials?

Another amusing claim of this is the metal-working which the panel mentions. Only one problem with that; the Bible makes absolutely no mention of the use of metals upon the Ark. More of which later.

Probably the most contentious of all the photographs is the one on race difference. In the panel photographed, Ark Encounter claim that all mankind are descended from the three sons of Noah; Shem, Japeth and Ham, and furthermore goes on to claim that if Noah and his wife were dark-skinned, then all skin colours, and races of Homo Sapiens, could be descended from them. Oh, and based upon only two genes.

Utter bunkum and unscientific, unintelligent gobbledegook. Skin colour is determined by “polygenic” traits, meaning that multiple genetic loci are involved in it's development. “At last count is has been determined that there are a total of 378 genetic loci involved in determining skin colour in human and mice. Among them, only 171 have been cloned and though the other 207 loci have been mapped out, the true gene identities have yet to be determined.” (International Federation of Pigment Cell Society). Slightly more than the two Ark Encounter are claiming, methinks.

In the simplest of terms, the driver of skin colour is of course melanin, which is much more prominent in dark-skinned people than in those of lighter skin. As our ancient ancestors moved out of Africa, relocating in areas with less sunlight, over time – like millennia – people in these areas required less and less melanin, and thus became lighter skinned (and giving caucasians a Vitamin D deficiency), and of those who settled in Australasia, exposed to much greater amounts of sunlight, their skin became much darker. As an Australian, one would have thought Ken Ham realised this. It is certainly possible for a black child to be born to a white couple, or vice versa, and there are recorded incidents of this happening, where there has historically been breeding between ethnic races. What cannot happen is the line of one ethnic race suddenly spawning another ethnic race, no matter what Ark Encounter's frankly racist “colour card” explanation claims.

So, we have a pic of what appears to be two velociraptors in a cage. And I have to congratulate Ark Encounter on getting this one right. Far from the fantasy of Jurassic Park, velociraptors were in fact small creatures. Their small size was in fact one of the factors which made them swift-moving hunters, hence the name they were dubbed with. I have no doubt that Ark Encounter are doing this to demonstrate that many dinosaurs, far from the huge monster lizards we imagine, were in fact pretty small, and they would be correct in this. However, I'd love to see the cages for even two young T-Rex, Apatosaurus, or the largest dinosaur of them all, Argentinosaurus, which grew up to 115 feet long, and weighed approximately 110 tons. Oh, don't tell me - Noah took eggs.  Yeah, and kept them on the Ark for a year, when they would be bound to hatch, and while they were indeed small when hatched, Argentionosuars apparently grew very rapidly.

Moreover, here we have an example of the metal-working which was mentioned earlier. That's quite a nice piece of metalwork actually, and if it were in any way representative of reality, it would mean that Noah or one of his sons was so adept in working metal that he had developed making wire. No easy trick when you're stuck in the middle of the desert. Of all the materials mentioned in the Bible which Noah was told to make the Ark with, there is absolutely no mention of metal; “Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.” (Genesis 6:14, KJV). To have us believe that Noah and his sons worked metal so skilfully, we would have to accept that first they managed to locate iron ore, mine it, smelt it, and work it into wire, when all the time they should have been busy building the ark. Even if we accept that one of them did all that, that reduces those actually shipbuilding to three, which of course can only increase the time dedicated to building the Ark.

But this wirework is the least of the contradictions, for the superstructure of Ken's Ark has in fact been given metal strengthening beams in places. And given there is no mention of metal in the Biblical account, Ark Encounter are not only misleading the public, they are in fact going against the very scriptures which they hold to be the inerrant word of God. What are the two words for that again? Oh yes, that's them; blasphemy and hypocrisy.

The next picture appears to be a food store, and plants growing (AiG maintain that all creatures were herbivores before the flood), one would imagine by some form of hydroponics. Well, a food store would have to take up a vast area of the Ark, much larger than that. And I'm afraid for Noah and his family, and all the creatures on the Ark, what we see in this photograph would not feed them for a day. Thereby there would not be sufficient time for more plants to grow. Not that they could grow anyway. It's very convenient for Ark Encounter to have all that modern electric lighting, but let us not forget that according to the Bible, the Ark was built with only one small window. Therefore, lit only by oil lamps and / or candles, the Ark would have been an extremely dark place, and it may have escaped Ken Ham's notice, but plants need sunlight to thrive. But even if there had been more windows, given that the Bible says it rained for forty days and forty nights, the plants would still get no sunlight, and a “nuclear winter” scenario would have ensued, killing the plants through lack of warmth and light.

And so onto the last photograph, and the alleged aftermath of the flood, which Ark Encounter claim laid down the sedimentary layers, creating fossils, and that it plunged Earth into “the ice age”, and they claim these changes lasted “decades”. Strangely enough, and somewhat inconvenient for Ark Encounter and other creationists, palaeontology has never, not once, ever, found the fossils or remains of ancient creatures alongside those of ancient creatures. There have certainly never been any human fossils found alongside dinosaurs. Sorry (not sorry) to disappoint Ark Encounter and Ken Ham, but The Flintstones is not a documentary. What palaeontology has found are transitional fossils of creatures through the sedimentary layers, which clearly illustrate evolution to be a clear fact. Oh but I forgot, creationists claim there are no transitional fossils. Well not unless you count the thousands upon thousands already discovered, and those which are continuing to be found on an almost daily basis.

As to “the ice age”, I take it that Ark Encounter are referring to the last glacial maximum. The fact is that Earth is still in the last 'ice age'; that's why the planet has polar ice caps. There have in fact been many glacial maximums in the history of the Earth, but I assume that Ark Encounter are referring to the last one, when ice sheets covered much of North America, Asia and Europe (Finchley Underground Station, London, in the UK – I kid you not; solid rock one side, clay the other, indicating the limit of the glacial maximum). And I suppose it did last for “decades”; if that is the way one wishes to divide up the vast millennia involved in it's formation, reaching the maximum, then deglaciation, which of course happened long before the 6000 years creationists claim the Earth has been around for. The last glacial period began some 110,000 years ago, the permafrost of the ice caps slowly increased for millennia, reaching the glacial maximum some 24, 500 years ago, before beginning to retreat 22,000 years ago to around 12,000 years ago. It was this encroaching and retreating ice which caused many changes to our ever-changing Earth. Rocks were polished, huge rocks carried from one place to another, and entire valleys were carved. Even in the southern hemisphere, where the ice never retreated onto the land, the climate change was severe enough to cause deseritification and drought. As the ice retreated, the sea levels rose quite substantially, and in many places land previously above sea level was submerged; the British Isles were cut off from the European continent, and the land bridge which previously connected Siberia to Alaska became what we today know as the Beiring Strait.

So, apart from changing the topography of a great deal of the Earth, what did the end of the last glacial maximum cause? Widespread and massive flooding, that's what. And here we may have the root of the flood myths.

The Biblical account of the Noahchian Flood almost certainly comes from the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient epic Mesopotamian poem, written in the Ur Dynasty, c.2100 BCE. Denying this, creationists are quick to point out that many ancient cultures have flood myths, which they claim backs up the Biblical account of a global flood. They'll probably be cock-a-hoop when I wholeheartedly agree with them. Stand by for their sad little bubble to be burst.

I am fascinated by folklore and in researching it, I have found that many myths have a basis in fact, which have been convoluted over time. And the older these myths, the greater the chance they were handed down from generation to generation in oral tradition, long before anyone started writing them down. So here's my hypothesis. Our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, has been on this planet for 200,000 years, and during that time we have had the ability to communicate. Our early ancestors were certainly around during, survived, and witnessed last glacial the encroaching ice leading to the last glacial maximum, and the deglaciation and flooding left in it's aftermath. The widespread flooding which the melting ice and rising seas created must have been devastating to these early inhabitants of the Earth, and as creatures and crops they relied upon for food were destroyed, along with the extreme cold, leading to a great many deaths, it must have appeared to them that “the Gods were angry” and the Earth was indeed coming to an end. Therefore, it is not outwith the bounds of possibility that those who witnessed these events handed down stories of them to younger generations, who in turn passed them onto the next generation, and so on, and so on. Like 'Chinese Whispers', with every one of these oral retellings, the stories became much and much more elaborated, until gods were worked into the picture, destroying mankind for their wickedness, until by the time it became a written account, that was the standard version.

Of course, I have absolutely no proof for that and I merely put it forward as one possible explanation for almost every ancient culture having flood myths. I would argue however, given what we know of palaeontology, geology, history - and shipbuilding, it is far, far more likely an explanation than a 6000 year old Earth being created in six days, which was formed as it is 4400 years ago.

Ark Encounter is a $73 million lie, full of laughable downright impossibilities. If I lived in the area, I would certainly visit it, for exactly the same reason I would visit Ken Ham's Creation Museum; for a bloody good laugh, because that it is all it is fit for. That should not detract one iota however from the fact that this 'attraction' is downright dangerous. Just like the Creation Museum, just like Answers in Genesis, Ark Encounter throws out all the peer-reviewed, accepted, and in the vast majority of cases, proven science of the origins of the Earth and all species upon it, and instead seeks to indoctrinate minds, particularly those of children, with a load of disproven, complete absurdities, and in places outright lies (amazing how many Christians think they can break the Ninth Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness” if they think the end justifies the means). And they do all this with not the tiniest shred of empirical evidence, but instead base their entire claim upon a bronze age book of goat herder's campfire tales, which they claim to be the inerrant word of their god, and which has long since been proven to be incorrect in a great many places.

I am willing to give Ark Encounter their due, that contrary to some claims the tax incentive they have been granted will not take taxpayers money away from other things. In fact, the incentive is a 25% reduction on sales tax from tickets and merchandise. So, if the funds aren't coming in, the less of a tax incentive they receive. How they came about this tax break however is indeed odious. Having been passed in 2009, it was subsequently removed when it was discovered that Ark Encounter will only employ Christians, and one would imagine Christians who share their YEC fantasies. AiG took the matter to court, and actually won, so the tax incentive was reapplied. Remember people that this is not a church, it is a tourist attraction, and yet Ark Encounter are being allowed to openly discriminate against people of other faiths and none in their employment policy. And that should make every Kentuckian, every US citizen, who believes in equality for all and the wall very, very angry.

But has Ark Encounter benefited from taxpayers money in any way, shape, or form? Yes, they have, and AiG are being very circumspect about this. A brand new intersection was opened off US Interstate 75 to facilitate access to the tourist attraction, at the cost to the taxpayer of a cool $11 million. Given that there is very little else on that turnoff in the back of beyond, had Ark Encounter never been built in Williamston, I am sure there are a great deal of better things Kentucky could have spent that money on.  And that should make Kentuckians and other US citizens who hold by the wall between church and state bloody livid.

Apparently the visitor numbers upon opening have been somewhat disappointing for Ark Encounter, and the “millions” of visitors they predicted in January have so far failed to appear. Part of me says bloody good job too. I would more than happily watch Ark Encounter, Answers in Genesis, and Ken Ham go bankrupt. They are doing untold harm to gullible, impressionable minds, and never more so when it is children being indoctrinated with their lies. I make no bones about this; feeding children the lies of creationist propaganda can only lead to them being ridiculed, it certainly harms their intellectual development, and it has the potential to harm future employment prospects, and that is nothing short of child abuse. As to adults who believe this guff, part of me feels downright sorry for anyone who could be that gullible, and the other part wants to slap the stupid out of them, preferably with a fossil.

But even if Ark Encounter, AiG and Ken Ham do start facing financial troubles, they need only go begging, as they have in the past, and sadly there are those who are so blinded by the poisonous filth which is creationism that they will happily donate to save Ken Ham's worthless hide. And that perhaps is the saddest fact of all.