Is the Bible true? US attractions like huge Noah’s Ark replica argue that it all is
The body behind Kentucky’s Ark Encounter and Creation Museum promotes creationism over evolution to the masses – and expansion is next
With a colossal replica of the biblical Noah’s Ark rising incongruously from the countryside of America’s Kentucky state behind him, Ken Ham gives a presentation he has often repeated.
The ark – the main feature at the Ark Encounter theme park – stretches 155 metres (510 feet), making it “the biggest freestanding timber-frame structure in the world”, Ham says. It holds three massive decks with wooden cages, food-storage urns, life-size animal models and other exhibits.
It is all designed to argue that the biblical story was literally true – that an ancient Noah really could have built such a sophisticated ship, and that he and a handful of family members really could have sustained thousands of animals for months, floating above a global flood that drowned everyone else in the wicked world.
“That’s what we wanted to do through many of the exhibits, to show the feasibility of the ark,” says Ham, the organiser behind Ark Encounter and its related attractions.
With that, Ham furthers his goal to assert the entire biblical Book of Genesis should be interpreted as written – that humans were created by God’s fiat on the sixth day of creation on an Earth that is now only 6,000 years old.
All this defies the overwhelming consensus of modern scientists – that the Earth developed over billions of years in “deep time” and that humans and other living things evolved over millions of years from earlier species.