Ken Ham took Bill Nye on a personal tour of his big ol’ fake boat, and they argued some. I think Ham came away with the idea that he won.
We’re glad Bill Nye took me up on my friendly offer to show him the Ark. During his visit I was able to personally share the gospel with him very clearly. On the first deck, I asked him, before a crowd of people including many young people, if I could pray with him and was able to pray for him there. Our prayer is that what he saw will have an impact on him and that he will be drawn to the gospel of Jesus Christ that is clearly presented at the Ark.
Many people have tried to share the gospel with me, as well, and it’s never been done clearly. It can’t be done clearly: have you ever read that Jesus story? It’s an incoherent mess, and makes no sense. Now maybe Ham performed a miracle and and explained it lucidly, but I rather doubt it: I’ve listened to him and his usual approach is to condescendingly talk down to people in that sing-song voice he uses when preaching to children.
I’d also tell Mr Ham that prayer doesn’t work, and that his whole pointless project is saying that we’re going to win, and he’s going to lose.
Look at this detail from a display in this photo: One world, two views
. I can tell already what theme he’s hammering on in the Ark Park, and it’s the same one he repeats over and over again in the Creation “Museum”. We’re all using the same evidence, he claims, and the only difference is in the interpretation, which in their case is informed by evidence the scientists reject, the literal testimony of the Bible.
It’s a lie. They ignore most of the evidence, and what they do let in they have to twist and distort to make it fit. We’re looking at a great big jigsaw puzzle, and we’ve assembled enough of it to get a general idea of what it illustrates — a very old Earth — and what Answers in Genesis loves to do is to grab a couple of random pieces, pound them together until they mash up, and then tell you that the Bible clearly explains that this mangled cardboard shows that the Earth is very young. It’s frustrating to listen to, and touring his “museum” is an exercise in chronic irritation, as every exhibit is a dishonest mess, all justified with that pathetic excuse of One world, two views
, and hey, this is just our opinion, and it’s just as valid as everyone else’s. Only it’s not. AiG doesn’t get to have their own facts.
But this is also their weakness, and how we’ll win, eventually. Their big, expensive projects are monuments to the fact that prayers and the Bible are not enough, and they know it. They desperately desire to have evidence on their side, to the point that they have to start inventing their own and misrepresenting the facts.
Bill Nye is not going to be persuaded by the fake Ark, because he knows what the actual evidence is, and seeing the place lying at every point is the opposite of persuasion — it’s active dissuasion to anyone knowledgeable at all. It’s a giant affirmation of ignorance, and so the ignorant will revel in it, while everyone else will be repelled.
This is why I’m not afraid to encourage scientists and atheists to visit: what needs to be done to correct its influence is informed discussion of its fundamental dishonesty. To do that, we need to witness it. But unless we fail to educate the public, this foolishness is ultimately doomed.
Didn’t Bill Nye have Rick “40 days of purpose” Warren perform his wedding? He’s well used to dealing nicely with religious folk, and I assume in letting them come away not feeling angry about it.
Are there any theories of a great flood that don’t violate a bunch of conservation laws?
It looks pretty cool from orbit:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ark+Encounter/@38.6216574,-84.5934472,317m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x88418ca4d6b493e9:0x3f40591086a1d307!8m2!3d38.6222186!4d-84.5922803
Safely inland so it won’t have to float when the global warming ocean rise starts to really kick in.
In order to lie, we must first know the truth. By their attempts to deceive, the arkparkers are admitting that they know the ark is a lie – and have known it all along.
@Marcus:
It quite literally cannot float — it’s fixed to the bedrock.
Those buildings you see on the side are an integral part of it, too.
Nye is thus demonstrating the proper scientific approach to these numbskulls. hear them out, let them speak their piece, then calmly walk away shaking head to clear the cobwebs. Give them a chance to spout their nonsense for everyone to hear what a fool they are. If some of the audience remains decived, too bad, we tried. Hearing every possible interpretation is the actual scientific method. Not to achieve some conclusion from a different starting point as Hamster claims. Hammy’s interp creates more questions than it answers; while science often opens more questions, it still answers quite a few. In other words, (to clarify):
Hammy gives answers that depend on not being questioned further while opening more questions, Science provides answers that require further examination to ‘get’ all the details of the answer. Hammy has found what could be considered the wiggle room where one aspect of science could be claimed in his favor. Yet that is completely absconding with the actual process of science and using it to deceive and defraud his audience.
Kudos to Nye for tolerating Hamster calmly.
Another problem with is that there aren’t just two views, especially if you’re going to consider religious stories as a valid view. There are thousands and thousands or millions of views, which must all be taken as equally valid under this premise.
Ken Ham’s ark actually looks like an ark only from one side, when you can’t see the support structures behind the facade. Ham has merely built a kind of “Potemkin ark.”
(I googled “Potemkin ark” because I was certain someone else had used the term by now. Surprise! There’s a company named “ARK” that offers a scale model of the battleship Potemkin.)
I quite like “Potemkin Ark”, and will steal it at every opportunity.
Hmm, no place to comment on the Hamster’s website? Wonder what they’re afraid of. When do we get to hear Bill Nye’s side of the story?
The pseudo-scientific tosh put out at this facility (including about climate change which has nothing to do with the Bible) will create a barrier for some people considering the claims of Christianity. But Ham purports to speak ‘for’ biblical Christianity. No one person could do that.
I am in doubt that it had an impact on him.
Oh FFS, that should have been ‘no doubt’. Stupid fingers…
re 12:
I disagree,
I think 11’s typo was more correct; equivalent to “I am in no doubt that it did not have an impact on him.” IMO (sorry if I miscomprehended)
I like Ham’s claim that the ark clearly shows the gospel of Jesus Christ. Yeah, this is exactly like Jesus. Ark 3:16 – “For God so hated the world that he sent an unholy flood so that every living thing should perish into everlasting fire.”
I like that the ark is set in Kentucky terrain that clearly shows a continuous process of gradual erosion.
The flood is just a few pages in the earlier part of the Bible. It doesn’t start off the Bible, it doesn’t get referred to later in the Bible, and it makes no sense even in itself, nor in the context of the Bible, nor in the world as a whole. This is like Ham liked it as a children’s story, what with the animals in the boat, and he doesn’t want to let it go as an alleged adult. So he just keep winding further and further down the rabbit hole, and he wants to take the world with him.
@Menyambal:
*cough* Matthew 24:37-39
Actually, Ham is very clear that the childish portrayal is misleading, and that the entire story is one of horrific genocide.
I’m pretty sure that he would phrase it as something like: the Flood was a demonstration of God pouring out his terrible wrath on all sinners, i.e., everyone. The Ark therefore demonstrates an example of God’s mercy; a foreshadowing of ultimate salvation.
Hm. Now I think of it, maybe that’s why the Ark isn’t so popular. I suspect that many Christians — even those who are YEC — don’t have quite as dark a view of God as Ham does.
Owlmirror, thanks. I couldn’t remember the verse, but I had that one in mind while deciding whether to write “much” in there. And that verse is about it (I say “about”), and it just mentions the ark as a comparision. It certainly doesn’t make believing in the flood to be as important as believing that Jesus was the son of God, or that Jesus even existed. The whole New Testament is almost all about Jesus, the whole Old Testament is not about the flood. Nobody cares about the flood.
Except Ham. He is desperately trying to equate the Flood and Jesus. And it gets pretty damnation dark.
Did anyone see one of the plaques in the photos posted on the Panda’s Thumb website that “explains” how Noah handled all that animal mess that was cleaned from the animal cages? http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2016/07/ark-park-on-ope.html#comment-355529
“SOLID WASTE REMOVAL
“After mucking large animal stalls and scraping droppings from the small animal collection troughs, solid waste could have been placed into wheelbarrows and moved to a vertical conveyor system. Powered by an animal on a treadmill, this drive would dump the waste into a vertical shaft that opened to the sea.”
Is there really a ship out there that actually has such an option to deposit waste into the sea? Or is it something Ham entirely made up to explain how did Noah get rid of all that animal waste without dealing with disease spreading throughout the ark?
@Owosso Harpist:
No, because there are rules against that sort of thing. While discharges of sewage and other types of wastewater have happened, no ship is designed to make such discharges part of the integral design of the ship.
That having been said, Ham may have had in mind something like a moon pool — technically unfeasible without advanced technology, but technical feasibility is not something that Ham has ever concerned himself with.
Hope Nye told Ham that the Ark museum will go bankrupt and leave KY tax payers holding the bag. Cannot believe that Ham thinks enough suckers will pay $40 (!) to visit the Ark.
According to the Bible, the Ark was built in a couple of weeks by a 500 year old man and a couple of sons using Bronze Age tools and material.
It took Ham more than a year and a crew of more than a hundred to build his “genuine replica” using composite materials and modern building technology such as cranes, steel, and arc welders.
Yeah, “genuine replica.”
So, he is doing some good after all!
“No, because there are rules against that sort of thing. While discharges of sewage and other types of wastewater have happened, no ship is designed to make such discharges part of the integral design of the ship.
That having been said, Ham may have had in mind something like a moon pool — technically unfeasible without advanced technology, but technical feasibility is not something that Ham has ever concerned himself with.”
I guess Ham never really cares about the health and well-being of every human and animal in and out of the ark. And how will marine and non-marine life really react to all those wastes getting dumped into the water, polluting it, when he made the whole thing up about how Noah dealt with animal and human waste that was produced inside the ship.
Back when I was somewhat younger, I had the biblical passage that described the Ark completely memorized–it was the Torah portion that I had to read (in both Hebrew and English) for my Bar Mitzvah. The rabbi never bothered to explain how big a cubit actually was. Alas, that memory was later overwritten by many science courses.
Given our best estimates, Ken Ham’s ark is about the “correct” size of what’s described in the bible (140-150 meters in length). It might float, but not for very long. There’s a very entertaining analysis of the problem over on Skeptoid (see “Noah’s Ark: Sea Trials”). Engineering analyses have shown that a wooden boat as described in the bible would be far too big and fragile to be seaworthy. History bears this out–only a handful of wooden ships 100 meters or larger have ever been attempted, and those that were didn’t last long. Their hulls flexed and leaked under the action of wind and wave, and the ships either sank or had to be reinforced with steel in order to stay afloat.
Ken Ham’s website claims that his ark is at the limit of what’s possible for a wooden ship, and cites the Chinese explorer Zhang He’s ships as justification. However, most historians think that He’s ships were less than half that length. So, Ken misrepresents both “what’s possible” and history.
So, I challenge Ken to do the following:
1. Construct an Ark (150 meters long x 15 meters high) in one month using only biblical-era materials with a crew of just six men. No power tools allowed.
2. Fill it up with tens of thousands of living creatures.
3. Take said loaded boat out to sea and sail in the open ocean for six months. It’s got to be raining heavily, so let’s make it the Caribbean sea. In the middle of hurricane season.
If everybody is afloat, alive and healthy after six months, then he will have proved something. Of course, the believers will just respond that my objections are meaningless, they can all be solved with God’s help. Doesn’t matter. Let’s see if Ken can do it.
@Owosso Harpist #22@
I expect the non-marine life wouldn’t react very much, being too busy drowning. ;-)
The claim could be “it was the first time ever for such a waste disposal. and ‘the solution to pollution is dilution’, with {an earth sized ocean to dilute the waste} = no prob”.
Ham is delicicious in so many ways …
@ellita:
I object if “living creatures” refers to non-human animals, since it would be cruel to subject them to those conditions.
However, if those “living creatures” were all human creationists volunteering for a Actual, Real, Genuine Ark Experience, well, it’s their lives and comfort to do with as they please.
* cough cough Matt 6:5-6 *
Has anyone seen the ads that are running on TV for this thing? They’re hilarious: they don’t show anything at all 9quite telling) and they look like they were produced by a high-school student- very low quality.