The Ark Park and the yokels who visit it are made for each other. An article Louisville Magazine describes the awe and wonder the fake ark inspires in attendees.
Golly,someone said when the Ark came into view.Oh my goodness.
Four guys built that,another man said.Unbelievable, isn’t it?
Yep, sure is unbelievable. Here’s a photo of an early phase in the construction.
One, two, three, many. Yes sir, four people made it.
Then there’s the point where visitors explain that gravity doesn’t exist.
Gravity has never been proven, because gravity is a large object attracted to a smaller object, and it’s never been seen. If gravity existed, a BB and a bowling ball should bump into each other. So you see how guys like Newton get caught in their own lies.
So, if I held a BB near, say, a big rock with a diameter of about 13,000 km, they would just hang there and not bump into each other? ‘k.
The reporter asked Georgia Purdom a rather fundamental question: why?
“So why an Ark?” I said. “Why build it at all?”
We want people to see that the Bible is true,Purdom said.Just as there was a judgement in Noah’s day, there’s another judgment coming, and those who don’t know Jesus Christ as their personal savior will spend eternity in hell.
Such nice people.
But really, my favorite part is where he asked Andrew Snelling for evidence that dinosaurs and people lived at the same time. Easy, he claims.
Purdom introduced me to geologist Andrew Snelling, who followed Ken Ham to the U.S. from Australia and for the last nine years has been the director of research for Answers in Genesis. I said,
“There were dinosaurs on the Ark, right?” Snelling nodded.Right.
“Then why aren’t there dinosaurs today?”
Dinosaurs went extinct after they left the Ark. After the Flood, we had the Ice Age. We had a radically different world. Some creatures weren’t able to adapt. But most cultures in the world have some legend about dragons, and these dragons are actually a good description of dinosaurs. The Chinese, for example — their dragons are depicted on scrolls pulling the chariots of emperors. And there was a story called Beowulf in which the king slays a dragon, and this happened in Norway.
“So you take Beowulf to be evidence of dinosaurs existing?”
Yes,Snelling said.It was an eyewitness account.
Huh. I just happen to have the Heaney translation of Beowulf right here, and this is the description of the dragon.
Unyielding, the lord of his people loomed
by his tall shield, sure of his ground,
while the serpent looped and unleashed itself.
Swaddled in flames, it came gliding and flexing
and racing towards its fate.
So it’s kind of a writhing, scaly, giant, worm-like creature. That breathes fire. That’s definite; it repeatedly talks about flames and smoke and burning. Are we then to believe that dinosaurs could breathe fire?
Here’s a Chinese dragon dinosaur for you. It doesn’t look much like any dinosaur species I know of, but apparently we are supposed to take “eyewitness accounts” as the gold standard.
Incredible. Literally incredible.
Yes, absolutely! Parasaurolophus had an enlarged nasal passage for creating fire. Chemically, it worked the same as the bombardier beetle — AKA the fire-farting cockroach. Just read “Dinosaurs by Design” by Duane T. Gish.
Checkmate, atheists!
“while the serpent looped and unleashed itself.
Swaddled in flames, it came gliding and flexing”
Snakelike body, flames and flexing… That’s no dinosaur, that’s Trogdor!
What was the point of taking dinosaurs on the ark (or quaggas, or thylacines, or dodos…) if they were just going to go extinct? Why did they need to be preserved, if they weren’t going to be preserved?
re @3:
Being omniscient Gawd knew they were going to go extinct so to ensure it they had to be on the ark to go extinct afterwards. If he abandoned them beforehand he would be seen as a jerk. Better to fulfill his own prophesy to stay honest.
—
aarrrgghhh. pretzel logic is so much fun /sarc.
pfffft
?
Apropos of nothing much — and I realise poopyhead did not claim this — traditional Chinese dragons do not breath fire, and are often considered more benign (even lucky) then the European legends. The European versions often did breath fire, of which the Beowulf variant is an example, and — like in Beowulf — are frequently anything but benign. (Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge points out the Beowulf dragon, a draca, is also called a wyrm, which is the name of an early Germanic fire-breathing dragon; this connection makes (linguistic) sense.)
Well, the absence of gravity would help a great deal in explaining how four people built the ark without cranes and construction vehicles. I’ll award them half a mark for accidental self-conistency.
Re: edmond (#3):
Apparently because the chinese emperor desperately needed a ride home. Thus, being all-knowing and merciful, God made it part of His plan for creation to have dinosaurs stick around just long enough to help out.
Noah had Tyvek®?
Well, that photo solves a long-standing mystery: apparently, “gopherwood” is just a bad translation of the Hebrew for “Tyvek”.
That guy who says that gravity doesn’t exist has to be an outlier, right? I can’t believe that the old joke about creationists thinking that gravity was just a theory was somehow accurate.
Of course we’ve observed gravitational effects. Astronomers have been observing celestial bodies like planets, moons, stars, asteroids, and comets exhibiting gravitational force on each other for decades. And yes, the mass of the object in question is proportional to the gravitational field it produces.
That bowling ball thing is monumentally stupid. Gravity is a very weak attractive force that requires a colossal amount of mass in order to have visible effects. Besides, any gravitational pull between a ball bearing and a bowling ball on earth would be overpowered by the earth’s gravitational pull on both of them.
Creationists have gone beyond parody. They really do hate science, and they want to roll our understanding of the universe back thousands of years.
Tries to suppress a giggle. Fails.
Tries to avoid falling to the floor, laughing. Fails.
Tries to avoid rolling around on said floor, laughing. Fails.
Tries to avoid rolling down the circular staircase to the front door of the lair. Succeeds. Gravity, after, .
The fall, laughing, onto the floor was just a great sky faerie miracle; or more likely, a new turtle was added to the stack underneath all the way down, pushing up the Earth slightly, making it appear I fell down — the floor (and rest of the flat “planet”) rose up to meet me.
Whereas abandoning millions of people to drown in the flood waters is totes OK and not in the least a mark of jerkhood. Teaches them no good moochers a thing or two.
stevewatson #8
much funnier
And to think, most of these people probably voted for the orange smurf.
Attraction between human-scale objects was measured, and a value for G obtained, in 1798 by Cavendish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_experiment. The force he measured was less than a micro-Newton, which is damned impressive, especially for 200 years ago. So the ballbearing and bowling ball thing could in principle be done, but you’d need a fantastically precise apparatus.
@blf
Does this guy even get that gravity depends on the masses of the objects and not on their relative sizes? Even if, say, two asteroids are roughly the same size, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to be attracted to each other. It always amazes me that creationists can be this ignorant of basic scientific concepts, and yet believe that they’re more qualified than actual scientists to talk about science. Also, creationists love to cite Newton as an example of a Christian scientist. I wonder what they would think of this guy calling Newton a liar.
I love the way it’s constructed like a stick-built house instead of a ship. It would collapse pretty quickly (even with the tyvek!) if it were actually in water. The forces on a ship of any size are really amazing, and noah’s ark would have had to handle some mighty rough water.
That thing appears to be clad in Pergo(r) or some other kind of composite flooring. Maybe to make it more resistant to rain? The whole thing is lolriffic.
emergence@15, Gravity has nothing to do with mass, or size / volume, at least not directly. It all has to do with the quantity and temperature of the dragon’s fire-breath. Lots of hot flame propel the dragon, conveniently nailed to object, into the other object, much faster than just a little pilot light would.
“Andrew Snelling … for the last nine years has been the director of research for Answers in Genesis.”
Easiest. Job. Ever.
Maybe the dinosaurs went all gay after they got off the ark, so Gawd smote them. /snark
I am no bible schooler but I do not remember the part about the ice age in it nor any history of it???
so radical there are no records of it?
uncle frogy
Um just throwing it out there, but doesn’t the writer of Beowulf assert the existence of the Norse Pantheon?
“Gravity has never been proven.” Geez, a bit slow, aren’t you? That was quantified in 1798. Pfft
Anyone who has read Terry Pratchett knows that Dragons are poorly designed chemical works so i can’t understand why they were allowed on the Ark ,what with all the straw used for bedding and the vast amounts of Methane pumped out on a daily basis .
PS ,you can’t see me but i am holding up a big sign that says sarcasm .
Well, if you did put a bowling ball and a BB in the middle of space free from influence, they would eventually bump into each other so I don’t know what they are even talking about.
I don’t recall and cannot now find my copy of Seamus Heaney’s 1999 translation. (Bummer.) So mostly from the older burnt-out memory, with a few whacks from Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge, the existing codex is either a Norse-like saga transcribed by xian scribes, or a retelling of some parts of xian mythology in a Germanic warrior setting. There are elements of several xian stories, but the tale itself is set in pre-xian times.
They don’t either.
Sorry, I neglected to mention in @25 that, just to confuse things further, some characters and sites in Beowulf seem to be based on real people and locations.
I always thought this was really fun http://www.theonion.com/article/evangelical-scientists-refute-gravity-with-new-int-1778
It’s supposed to be a parody.
It
is
supposed
to
be
a
parody.
Fuck.
I don’t find it funny any more.
Huh? “3 times 2 equals 6” has never been proven, because it is a large number multiplied by a smaller number. How does that follow?
I mean, supposing it’s unproven, how could that be so, on the basis that it pertains to an object attracted to a differently-sized object? Is there some reason why only identically-sized objects might be proven to interact with each other in a certain way? Is it impossible to prove attraction between objects of any sort? Or are you just saying some absurd bullshit?
I have to wonder… What would someone actually get out of the deal when they reject gravity? Can you levitate now? Is it some kind of misconceived weight-loss plan? Do you have to say so, in order to go to your favorite country club, militia, klan meeting, etc.? Or what is this supposed to be for?
Yes, uh … what? First of all, do BBs and bowling balls never bump into each other, or does that happen occasionally, even if not primarily due to gravity? (Do I really need to go to a sporting goods store just to guarantee it’s happened at least once, or can I pick a more convenient pair of objects?) If that does happen, well then…. maybe you should think about your “evidence” a little bit, since they very trivially do what they “should” be doing.
And be very, very, very patient while waiting for your results about actual gravitation. In the meantime, you could perhaps just go fuck yourself.
I will reference an artwork by a great American liberal, Norman Lear.
Specifically, an episode of “All in the Family”.
Archie Bunker has just relieved himself of some twaddle equal to that referenced above. His daughter, turns, raises her eyes to the sky, and walks off, waving her hands and saying, “Aarrglebargle.” Her husband, Mike, comes down the stairs, sees her, and says simply, “You too, huh?”
These people are not skeptics. oh no. These people would reject the photos of the construction workers as “faked”; they reject all scientific evidence as “untrue”; in fact, they deny all the evidence of their senses, including their sense that they are attracted to the ground. They have created an ENTIRELY IMAGINARY WORLD based upon a single interpretation of the Bible, and they live in it, and they will die in it.
That Louisvlle Magazine website is a fucking nightmare.
> There are elements of several xian stories, but the tale itself is set in pre-xian times.
The story takes place in the 5th century in Denmark and Geatland, which we know as modern-day Sweden. It is in the latter location–not Norway–that Beowulf kills the dragon.
The prevailing view among scholars is that the Beowulf story came to Britannia via Scandinavia in the eighth century as a wholly Norse oral poem. There, it became part of an oral tradition that included evangelical stories of Christ; the process or countless retellings hybridized the narrative, with the Christian god in some cases replacing the Norse gods altogether. (This explains why, in the poem, pagan characters consistently praise and are aided by a god that, in the 5th century, they would not have known to exist.) The 11th-century Christian monks that wrote the poem down merely finished a job that was centuries in the making.
https://youtu.be/lXm1bzrEU-A
The above video is pitched to high school students but it tells the history well enough.
Proving gravity in your basement: https://www.fourmilab.ch/gravitation/foobar
The kind of Christians who take the Ark story literally often also believe that other people’s gods/spirits etc. actually exist, but that they’re demons of some sort. So it’s not much of a leap for them to use ancient tales from other cultures as evidence for their ideas, even if they’d be evidence other supernatural beings exist.
First and foremost, there is indeed no such thing as gravity. The earth sucks, largely due to the existence of humanity.
Second, dinosaurs do still exist, as evidence, I present myself.
Finally, the earth is actually flat. Gravity just distorts space enough to make it appear as an oblate sphere.
All, jokes that I’ve used at parties, to excellent effect. Although, granted, the last one works best with a crowd that’s quite knowledgeable about physics. It’s more a mathematically geared joke, due to the gravitation that would be required to create that effect.
While one can make the appropriate mass and rotation to actually make such a last statement true, Sol would’ve been disrupted immediately.
Wow, gravity deniers. That’s a new one to me.
I assume the “four guys” thing is a reference to the fictitious original (supposedly built by Noah and sons).
#14: I did the Cavendish measurement in a physics lab course thirty years ago. A modern tweak is to put a mirror on the torsion arm and bounce a laser off it onto a wall as far away as possible. This is somewhat easier than using a telescope to look at the motion of a reflected image. The reflected beam is moved at twice the angle change. At 10 meters, 1mm is an angle of about 0.9 microdegrees. And yes, it’s basically impossible to make it still. You do have to make sure nothing is magnetic and ground the balls together electrically to avoid static charges. You can move the fixed masses from one side to the other so as to double the motion.
Heyyyyy! We have verified evidence that dinosaurs and humans co-existed. I remember watching an extended documentary TV series in the 1960s about human-dinosaur interactions. I think its title was the Flintrocks or Rockstones.
Sorry, my memory is going bad. But I clearly remember the human-dinosaur stuff.
Also, the Beowulf documentary explains why dinosaurs finally went extinct. It wasn’t the Ice Age. It was humans hunting them. Hunters likely went for the young, small dinosaurs, but occasionally the master hunters would go after a big one. Beowulf might well be an eyewitness account of the killing of the last dinosaur on Earth. Remember how the first humans to colonize the Americas wiped out some animal species? Same thing in Europe. The dinosaurs were Europe’s buffalo.
Badly put on my part, sorry. I meant prior to the adoption of xianity in much of Scandinavia.
There are certainly stylistic elements (at least) which suggest Beowulf, or perhaps similar-ish poems, was transmitted orally (similar to Homer) before being written down. We have no idea when, where, or in what language it was first written down†; nor how many generations removed the sole surviving copy is from the either the first written edition. Somewhere along the arc leading to that sole copy, the xians got their hands on it, and almost certainly mutated it.
† Limits can, of course, be put on the timing (e.g., not later than so-and-so, and unlikely to be earlier than such-and-such); the location (e.g., as an extreme example, not China); and similar.
nihilfidelius @ # 32: The [Beowulf] story takes place in the 5th century …
So dragonosaurs lived well past the purported time of Jesus, and those pics of him riding a velociraptor are photographs, obviously.
Funny how all the dinogons who survived the Ice Age persisted only in glacier country. The Chinese who conquered Tibet must have been looking for their caves-full-of-gold in the northern Himalayas.
me@39, from the either the first → from the first
Apologies for the proo badfreading.
Decades ago I heard one idiot creationist preacher claim that some dinosaurs were fire breathing, so all of those fables about fire breathing dragons were actually true. How did they breath fire? They had stones in their throat that they could clack together and cause a spark. They did this while exhaling methane (wrong end, but that’s creation science for you) and spitting out fire as a result.
There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find someone who will actually believe it.
Hey PZ: Here’s an off-topic comment, a suggestion for something you might want to blog on:
So far Trump’s candidates for science and education positions have been god-awful, terrifying, stupid, ultra-mercenary, and crazy. BUT there seems to be ONE exception, a genuinely brainy, genuinely qualified person he’s considering for a science-advisor: David Gelernter, comp-sci prof at Yale, pioneer in parallel-processing programming, computer-futurist, also a writer on non-science issues. He has right-wing politics, but he’s not obviously stupid, terrifying, or crazy like everyone else. (Gelernter is also, incidentally, a survivor of an attack by the Unabomber, lost several fingers and some of the vision in one eye.) If you don’t know who he is, look him up.
Had he been reading the Dragonriders of Pern series, by any chance? At least that fictional universe is cool.
Well duh. Of course there were dinosaurs on the ark. The bible explicitly mentions doves.
PS. You know all the jokes along the lines of “… tastes … like chicken”?
“How does chicken taste?”
“Like dinosaur.”
” If gravity existed, a BB and a bowling ball should bump into each other.”
Quite a succinct description of the Cavendish experiment.
@29 consciousness razor:
http://www.platitudes.org.uk/maths/pi.html
Peter Hearty (of Platitude Of The Day fame) on The Godly Value of PI.
@43 handsomemrtoad
From Wikipedia, David Gelernter:
In America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats), Gelernter argues that American higher education has become more leftist, “thrusting”, and “belligerent”, due to “an increasing Jewish presence at top colleges”.
Uh, there goes the mythical non-fascist sane Trump advisor.
One of my posts has been deleted ,don’t know why ,it was a great bit of satire.
There’s plenty of other evidence that dinosaurs an people co-existed: just look at Alley Oop or B.C.
Take that opponents of Cartoonationism!!!
I love Heaney . Haven’t read his Beowulf though. Put it on my to do list.
Hairhead @30:
Some years age, I was coming home from a
[WARNING — FIRE STORY — WARNING]
fire up in the Mendocino Naitonal Forest. I arrived in Sacremento (well, a suburb of Sacremento) in the late afternoon, cleaned out the car (a POS Jeep Wrangler Extreme), repacked my bags, and then walked over to a Panera for dinner and to grab a sandwich for the next day on the airplane.
There were two groups meeting there. One group was happily knitting and crocheting with abandon, creating beautiful Afghans, scarves, sweaters and hats.
The other group was studying the Bible. The day’s lesson focused on just how useless our senses are. And, by extension, the uselessness of all scientific research.
To illustrate, the teacher (and I use that term very loosely) explained that he had gotten a ticket that very afternoon for running a red light. He saw a green light and drove through. The cop who pulled him over issued a citation because the light was not green. Satan had altered his perception of colour.
The upshot was him telling his group that they should never ever ever trust their eyes, ears, brain, to be telling them the truth because the deciever is sneaky and likes to play tricks on them.
He never mentioned gravity, but arrglebargle sums the whole talk up nicely.
I left before they did because I did not want to meet him in the parking lot with him in a large car and me on foot and him not willing to trust his eyes about the large man in green pants and bright yellow shirt and where I actually am.
Nemo @36:
If they had had one more, we could have had hamburgers and greasy fries 4,000 years ago.
==============
And yes, I can believe that there are really people as ignorant as those in the OP. Met some of them in my time. And every truly ignorant person I have ever met has been and Evangelical Christian.
Capt. Buzzkill Pedant, reporting:
Dinosaurs still walk among people. dammit, cluttering our skies and pooping on our statues and windshields. Just because we now call them birds is irrelevant. They are still dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were not just those hige fossils we occasionaly see poking out of the ground and then excavate. grrrrr
[removing that cap]
exit stage left
I worked with a guy who was doing his PhD at the same time as Andrew Snelling. He said the other students called him Andrew Smelling. On another note when Snelling was working as a consultant for mining companies he would accept the accuracy of radiometric dating and use millions or billions of years in his reports. When he was writing for his fellow Cretinists he would reject radiometric dating and claim a 6000 to 10000 year age for the earth. This prompted one of his critics to produce a pamphlet containing quotes from his company reports on one page and quotes from his Cretinist writings on the other. The pamphlet was entitled “Will the real Andrew Snelling please stand up”. I think I might even have a copy of it somewhere.
@48 Miguel Vicente
That quotation was taken out of context. A lot of Jewish profs ARE leftist, and Gelernter himself is a thrusting, occasionally-belligerent Jew. (Full disclosure: I am, too.)
That fancy box they say is a reconstruction of the Ark
If afloat it would hog like a wild boar
The cladding (planking) by the keel would not withstand the water pressure
The other cladding would not hold up to storm action for more than about 1 hour
There is no method of damping pitching
There is no rudder
There is no method of keeping head to wind
There is no way to deploy or fasten a sea anchor
If it was lined with mineral pitch the beasts near the bilge would be suffocated by hydrocarbon gases.
You can tell that the people who believe this load of twaddle would preferential vote for Dumb-old Lump
Since I tend to like some sensation every now and then, I would love if men and dinosaurs did walk together.
So creationists, don’t accuse me of an atheist agenda. I’m on your side totally!
If Noah and his sons built an ark like that, where did they get all the drywall and vapor barrier?
As mentioned by others previously, this is the mysterious “gopherwood”, presumably provided by the magic sky faeries, for a nominal price of multi-millennium-long bigotry, multi-millennium-long warmongering, and multi-millennium-long dishonesty.
@blf, every reference I’ve ever saw referred to shittem wood as acacia.
https://media1.britannica.com/eb-media/62/156362-004-97591AD5.jpg
That it’d take a ludicrous amount of those trees to make a rowboat, let alone something to carry an extended family, let alone pairs of animals is quite patently obvious.
wzrd1@60, My snark generator, your snark detector, both, or Reality™, needs adjustment.
@blf, my snark generator definitely also needs realignment. The detector works far better when in the physical presence of the speaker. :)
Yes. And that these giant, fire-breathing beasts that ate people were kept on a wooden ship for a year in tiny confines tended to by eight people.