by William Trollinger

As we posted a few days ago, in January the “population experts” at Answers in Genesis (AiG) suggested that there may have been nearly four billion people on the earth at the time of their necessary-for-young-earth-creationism global Flood in 2348 BCE. As we suggested in our post, such a claim is both logically ludicrous – people who actually know something about population history have estimated are that there were 170 million people on earth in 1 CE – and morally appalling (eight people and 2000 animals were worth saving, while four billion people and billions more animals deserved death by drowning?)

But we wrote this post before Ark Encounter’s opening day. Having visited the Ark, we now realize that matters are much more ludicrous and much more appalling in the Land of AiG than we thought.

According to a placard in the Ark entitled, “How Many People Lived on Earth Prior to the Flood?,” the fact that pre-Flood people had “such long lifespans” (Methuselah almost made it to the millennium mark!) meant that “families could have been very large, and the population growth rate may have been much higher than today.” So when the lucky eight climbed into the Ark the population of the Earth may have been “19,947,270,231.”

Twenty billion.

Let that sink in.

According to Ark Encounter, the population on Earth may have grown from 2 in 4004 BCE to 20 billion in 2348 BCE.

According to Ark Encounter, the pre-Flood population could have been 12.5 billion higher than the current population of 7.4 billion.

According to Ark Encounter, it makes all the sense in the world that Noah and his family happily and contentedly enjoyed the benefits of domestic life (more on this in a later post) on a huge houseboat while divinely-wrought slaughter was going on just outside.

According to Ark Encounter, it makes all the sense in the world that we too should not be bothered by this divinely-wrought slaughter. As stated on the placard, “Was It Just for God to Judge the Whole World?”:

“Since He is the one who gave life, He has the right to take life. Second, God is perfectly just and must judge sin. Third, all have sinned and deserve death and judgment!”

Not only were Noah and his family unperturbed by the genocide of genocides, but visitors to the Ark should be equally unperturbed. Ho hum, twenty billion human beings dead . . . but they deserved it!

Perhaps to ensure that visitors do not dwell on mass slaughter, at Ark Encounter we found no depictions of human beings drowning. This is in contrast with the Creation Museum, with its dioramas of humans desperately trying to survive the rising flood waters while the Ark floats by (Righting America, 54-56).

This said, there is nothing subtle about Ark Encounter. What we have here is a “family friendly” tourist site that celebrates the rescue of eight people from the ravages of a global Flood and the righteous drowning of perhaps twenty billion human beings (and billions more animals).

Genocide of genocides, indeed.