Big Wooden Box gets snazzy video treatment


I was asked by Paulogia to say a few words about Answers in Genesis’s news story about my visit to the Big Wooden Box* in Kentucky. I think I said more than a few, because it turned into a half-hour complaint which he then made entertaining by turning me into a cartoon, and by adding lots of videos made by others of the interior of the Big Wooden Box. You should watch it.


*They really hate it when you call it the Big Wooden Box rather than Noah’s Ark. So guess what I’m going to call it from now on?

Comments

  1. petern says

    Did you ever wonder why the boat that Noah built is called an “ark”? What is an ark, anyway? An ark is a chest — a big wooden box (like the “ark of the covenant”, the box in which the fragments of the tablets upon which God wrote the ten commandments were kept, or so the story goes).

    The reason that the book of Genesis says that Noah built an “ark” is because the story comes from the Greek myth of Deucalion. In that myth, Zeus was angry at the people, and sent a deluge and a catastrophic flood to wash the land clean. Deucalion was an old man who survived by building a large crate and stocking it with his valuables and riding out the flood on it — as the water receded, the box came to rest on a mountain.

    Sound familiar?

  2. Owlmirror says

    Did you ever wonder why the boat that Noah built is called an “ark”? […] An ark is a chest — a big wooden box (like the “ark of the covenant” […]

    Actually, Hebrew uses two different words for what Noah built ( תיבה ; tevah), and for the box for the inscribed commandments (אָרוֹן ; aron).

    The decision to use the same word to translate the two different words goes back to the Greek and Latin editions of the bible.

    The reason that the book of Genesis says that Noah built an “ark” is because the story comes from the Greek myth of Deucalion. In that myth, Zeus was angry at the people, and sent a deluge and a catastrophic flood to wash the land clean. Deucalion was an old man who survived by building a large crate and stocking it with his valuables and riding out the flood on it — as the water receded, the box came to rest on a mountain.
     
    Sound familiar?

    I am baffled as to why you think the story of Noah derives from the Greek rather than deriving from the Sumerian/Babylonian.

    The Greek might also derive from the Mesopotamian, or it might be a (semi-?) independent invention. Wikipedia, at least, suggests that Deucalion might owe something to the Sumerian Utnapishtim.

  3. petern says

    Owlmirror,

    I wasn’t aware of the Hebrew vocabulary — thanks.

    For the record, I shouldn’t have implied that the [earlier] Old Testament story derives from the [later] Greek one (best known from Ovid), but rather that myths about floods caused by angry gods were all over the ancient Middle East. I imagine most people know about the Sumerian stories but similar ones are much more widespread.

  4. archangelospumoni says

    Dr. Myers:
    Well done on the visit to the unark, your evaluation of the unark, and the video answers with appropriate bullshit from Ham and the other Hamsters. I don’t have the patience.
    There is, quite simply put, a great steaming mass of humanity who slurp this right up and a great majority of them are proud Drumpfheteers.

    End of story.

  5. John Harshman says

    Well, you were wrong about one thing. The Big Wooden Box exhibit doesn’t say there were 35,000 kinds. It says there were 1500 kinds out of which 35,000 modern species, umm, evolved (?). Score one for Ham.

    I’m not sure exactly what kind of flood AIG subscribes to, or where they put the flood boundary. But almost certainly those kinds would include a number of taxa that left no extant descendants — that azhdarchid, for example — so the number of kinds ancestral to the modern 35,000 species is certainly much less than 1500. Until that’s clarified, we don’t really know just how much accelerated macroevolution is required by their story. Conceivably, they only need speciation within genera, which is still nonsensical, but not as nonsensical as entire families or orders from single pairs.

    And of course that 35,000 is presumably all land-based vertebrates, and the arthropods, nematodes, molluscs and such are ignored entirely as unimportant, as are the plants, fungi, protists, prokaryotes, and anything that lives in water, salt, fresh, or brackish.

  6. John Harshman says

    So you’re saying you would not like a wooden box
    You would not like it with a fox
    You do not like that old Ken Ham
    You do not like it, Sam I Am

  7. gijoel says

    Little boxes on the hillside
    Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
    Little boxes on the hillside
    Little boxes all the same
    There’s a green one and a pink one
    And a blue one and a yellow one
    And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
    And they all look just the same

  8. anchor says

    Its a big wooden box.
    Not only is it a big wooden box, it is a big wooden box that contains lots of smaller wooden boxes.
    Its a big wooden box that contains lots of little wooden boxes.
    It’s a pile of wooden boxes inside a big wooden box.
    Lots of wooden boxes are contained in that big wooden box.
    A big wooden box that has already begun to decay contains many smaller wooden boxes.
    Many little wooden boxes are contained within a big wooden box.
    A big wooden box has lots of smaller wooden boxes cleverly stashed within it.
    The big wooden box is big enough to contain wooden boxes that are smaller.
    Wooden boxes of various sizes are contained in a big wooden box.
    The wooden box is big.
    Wooden boxes that are relatively small are contained within the big wooden box.
    A wooden box that is big enough to contain smaller wooden boxes is big.
    A big box that is wooden contains many little boxes that are wooden.
    Boxes that are wooden are small if they fit inside a big wooden box.
    Small wooden boxes are smaller than a big wooden box.
    A big wooden box is even bigger than a small wooden box.
    A wooden box that is smaller than a big wooden box is a smaller wooden box.
    A wooden box that is bigger than a small wooden box is a bigger wooden box (although, not quite so big as Ken Ham’s head)
    A box which is big and wooden is a box which is wooden and big.
    A small box (oronym not to be confused with the disease) is smaller than a big box, even if they are not wooden.
    A big box is bigger than smallpox, even though neither may be wooden.
    I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this…
    A wooden box by any other size may smell as sweet as lots of little wooden boxes.
    Wooden boxes of any size may be big or small.
    A…oh dear, my sciatica is acting up
    I hope Ken appreciates the effort I put into this!