Counting Visitors at Ark Encounter
by William Trollinger
In Righting America we took at face value what Answers in Genesis (AiG) had to say about the Creation Museum, and then we tested these claims.
It makes sense to do the same with Ark Encounter. One place to start is the feasibility study produced by America’s Research Group (ARG) – headed up by Britt Beemer, Ken Ham’s friend and occasional co-author – to accompany the 2013 issuance of bonds worth $62 million, bonds which make possible the construction and equipping of the first phase of the Ark project. According to ARG’s feasibility study:
“The Ark Encounter is expected to attract between 1.2m and 2.0m visitors . . . during the first year of operation.” (A-38)
Breaking down the numbers:
1.2m/year = 100000/month, 23077/week, 3315/day
1.6m/year = 133333/month, 30769/week, 4420/day
2.0m/year = 166667/month, 38462/week, 5525/day
Given these projections, we expected an enormous opening day crowd. But as we previously posted, when we left the Ark just after noon on July 7 not one single person was in line to buy a ticket, and most of the eight parking lots were empty. Other observers noted the same thing, and some wondered if the non-seaworthy Ark had already sprung a leak.
But the Ark’s opening day was a Thursday. What would it be like on the weekend? So at 9:00 AM Saturday, July 23 we plunked down another $80 to re-enter the Ark and promised each other we would leave by noon.
Given that this project really needs repeat visitors, Sue focused on how folks were engaging or not engaging the Ark. More on what she discovered in a later post.
Because Bill loves tedious tasks, his job was to count visitors. This job was made much easier by the fact that the Ark is designed for visitors to follow a clear path through each floor and then – via the large ramps – up to the next floor. Because we arrived just a few minutes after the Ark opened, Bill was able to skirt the crowds and head up to the second floor (no one was yet on the third floor) where he counted everyone. Then it was back down to the first floor, where he secured a spot by the ramp to the second floor. For over two hours he counted everyone going up. At around 11:30 Bill made one final pass through the first floor, and then we headed to the gift shop.
Of course his numbers are not definitive. A few people may have been missed, a few people may have been double-counted. Still, his numbers provide a nice snapshot.
From Bill’s count, between 9 and 11:30 AM there were 1646 visitors on the Ark, children and toddlers included.
We chose to be there in the morning because that seemed the most likely time for visitors to arrive, especially those who were part of church groups (and we spotted at least five groups). But given that the Ark is currently open until midnight (!), we want to allow for the possibility that 2/3 of Ark visitors showed up after noon.
So for the purposes of our guesstimate, let’s triple the attendance numbers. Let’s say there were 4938 visitors on July 23.
At first glance that seems very good. Reach this total every day of the year, and you have almost 1.8 million visitors. But wait. The Ark would have to reach this total every day of the year. According to Gallup, more Americans vacation in July than any other month (on average, 51% of Americans who plan to take a vacation will take it in July). And we were there on a Saturday. What happens on a Wednesday in November, or a Thursday in January, or a Tuesday in March?
Thinking about it this way, 2m visitors or even 1.6m visitors for the year seems, at best, highly improbable. Actually, 1.2m visitors seems very unlikely. Surely at least half of that number – 600,000 – need to visit the Ark during the 92 days of June, July, and August. That means 6522 visitors EVERY DAY in the summer. And that’s almost 1600 more than our guesstimate for Saturday, July 23, 2016.
Perhaps Ken Ham and AiG have everything in hand. But we wonder if any bondholders are feeling uneasy about their investment, especially given that the feasibility report claimed that “the 1.2m first-year attendance scenario [will be] followed by annual attendance increases” (Appendix A, 13).
What Else Is Missing at the Museum and the Ark?
by Emily Hunter McGowin
The authors of Righting America observe that, “given the Creation Museum’s stated commitment to biblical inerrancy and the very words of the Bible as ‘God-breathed,’” it is striking that the museum is “oddly loose” in its presentation of the Bible (136-137). But as Dr. McGowin discusses below, it is even more striking how much of the Bible the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter leave out.
In a previous post, the authors of Righting America noted the fact that Jesus Christ gets very little attention at the Ark Encounter and at the Creation Museum. He appears as a savior to be sacrificed rather than a teacher to be followed. It is perhaps understandable that the man who overturned cultural boundaries, embraced the poor and outcast, and called his followers to love their enemies doesn’t get much play in an institution devoted to waging a culture war.
But Jesus isn’t the only curious thing largely absent in the Creation Museum. Also missing, as Righting America points out, are the people of Israel. You see this clearly in the Answer in Genesis (AiG) “Seven Cs in God’s Eternal Plan,” which is supposed to encompass the whole history of the world:
Creation – Creation by God’s Word
Corruption (the Fall) – Rejection of God’s Word Led to Corruption
Catastrophe (the Flood) – Rejection of God’s Word Led to the Catastrophe
Confusion (Babel) – Rejection of God’s Word Led to Confusion
Christ – The Promise of God’s Word
Cross – The Answer of God’s Word
Consummation -The Fulfillment of God’s Word
AiG’s version of the biblical story goes straight from Genesis 10 (the Tower of Babel story) to Matthew 1 (Christ). In terms of the Christian canon, they skip from the first book of the Bible to the fortieth. What’s happening in-between? From Genesis to Malachi is the long, eventful story of God’s people, Israel, and their relationship to God. For an organization dedicated to the Bible’s veracity and trustworthiness, it is strange that the story of God’s relationship with Israel, to which the majority of the Bible is devoted, is largely ignored. As Righting America says,
“In the museum … Jews have been consigned to playing the minor roles in a drama scripted by Christians” (46).
But the Jewish people aren’t the only community given little play in the Creation Museum. In addition to ignoring the Old Testament people of God, AiG is also not much interested in the church, the New Testament people of God. This is puzzling because it seems like “Church” would have been a natural “C” for their “Seven Cs.” But instead of Church, they go straight from “Christ” to “Cross” to “Consummation.”
Still, the reconciliation of all peoples—especially the previously antagonistic Jews and Gentiles—within the newly formed church is a central preoccupation of the New Testament. The body of Christ, the bride of Christ, the community of disciples, the temple of God—all these phrases in the New Testament describe the new people of God created by the reconciling work of Christ. In the words of the letter to the Ephesians:
“[T]hrough the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.”
The Jewish people and the church are the two communities from whom the Christian scriptures emerged and in which the Bible has been interpreted for thousands of years. To deal with the Jewish people or the church is to deal with history, tradition, and the ongoing work of both communities to interpret the scriptures. For Christians in particular, to reckon with the church is to reckon with the fact that the Bible doesn’t belong exclusively to individual Christians but to the whole church across space and time. If AiG were to acknowledge this truth, however, they’d have to acknowledge that their interpretations of the Bible are very much rooted in our modern American cultural moment. Put simply, it is easy to turn the Bible into a modern scientific textbook when it is extracted from the particulars of the worshipping communities that produced it.
The absence of the Jewish people and the church also exposes the individualistic heart of the AiG narrative. For AiG, Jesus is primarily a tool for individual atonement and sin forgiveness and his return is anticipated as the rescue of saved souls from a wicked world. There is no community to which a believer in Christ belongs and is accountable.
On display in the Creation Museum is the American evangelical tendency to focus on the individual, personal, and private to the exclusion of the communal, social, and public. And because AiG presumes to interpret the Bible above the millennia of worshipping communities and their traditions, they are able to idealize their individualistic reading as the only universal, orthodox way of interpreting the Bible.
Rather than the Creation Museum, it would be more accurate to call it the Museum of a Modern American Fundamentalist Interpretation of the Bible.
Emily Hunter McGowin has a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Dayton. Her current research focuses on the Quiverfull movement within American evangelicalism. Her articles have appeared in New Blackfriars and Baptist History and Heritage, and she has a chapter in Angels on Earth: Mothering in Religious and Spiritual Contexts (Demeter Press, forthcoming 2016).
Looking for Jesus at Ark Encounter
by William Trollinger
As we document in Righting America (48-49, 225-227), Jesus makes few appearances at the Creation Museum. He appears just twice—in a ghostly white statue that is usually kept in a corner of one exhibit room (except during the Christmas season when it is displayed in the Main Hall) and in the Last Adam film, which takes an approach akin to Mel Gibson’s in The Passion of the Christ and devotes all of thirty-two seconds to Jesus’ teachings and three minutes and forty-five seconds to images of Jesus being flogged and executed, usually in slow motion.
With nearly twice the square footage of the Creation Museum (the Creation Museum measures 75,000 square feet while Ark Encounter boasts 140,000), surely Ark Encounter says a lot more about Jesus, who is presumably the whole point of it all. Right?
So far, we have found only three areas in the Ark Encounter where mention is made of Jesus. One appears on a placard amidst images of a raging flood devouring all the sinners of the pre-flood world. That placard refers to an account in Matthew (24:37-39) according to which Jesus said that when the Son of Man comes things will be like they were in the time of Noah. People will be going about their business unaware that judgment is coming. We take it that the point here is that Jesus is an ultra-reliable witness to the fact that the flood actually happened.
Another appears amidst a series of text-placards that talk about why a perfect and righteous God is obliged to judge (destroy in a global flood) billions of humans, excepting eight. The answer: God gives life, so He can take it away; God is perfect and must judge sin (to stay perfect, or something); and we are all sinners, so we all deserve to die. Here Jesus appears again as the perfect sacrifice who holds out the promise of eternal life without sin.
Jesus’ third appearance at the Ark Encounter comes in the form of a series of placards that follow a large image of the scene of the crucifixion—Jesus appears to be suffering his last on the cross, two other crucifixions are underway on either side of him, Roman soldiers stand by as a crowd witnesses Jesus’ death. Seven placards follow. Six have only text on them. The seventh is an image of Jesus’ tomb.
The message is simple. What is important about Jesus, again, is that he died on the cross in order to give us sinners a chance for salvation. A point the placards emphasize is that salvation does not come to those who do good works (of mercy or charity or kindness or love). What matters is that we confess our sins, turn from our sinful ways, and plead for God’s forgiveness.
It’s striking how little there is about Jesus. As far as we can tell he appears on all of nine textual placards and one image placard in the space of 140,000 square feet. And it is striking that, just as in the Creation Museum, what matters about Jesus is 1) that he thought people would be going about their business when the Son of Man arrived and 2) that he was the perfect sacrifice that makes it possible for God to forgive people who confess their sins and beg for forgiveness.
Here, as in the Creation Museum, nothing about Jesus’ life, his ministries of healing the sick and afflicted, or his preference for hanging out with sinners. Nothing about his teachings seems to be worthy of note.
All those square feet (and much of it rather empty, as we noted in our last post) and no place to talk about how Jesus called us to love our neighbor, love even our enemy, make peace, turn the other cheek, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty.
We suppose all that is just “works.”
In these deeply troubling days of so many vile words and too many bullets, it sure would have been nice to see the Prince of Peace make an appearance.
Three More Surprises on Ark Encounter’s Opening Day
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
In our July 9 blog post, we reported being surprised, really surprised, by how few visitors we saw on Ark Encounter’s opening day (July 7). Apparently, we weren’t the only ones who took notice. Plenty of images are now available online that document the fact that for much of the day there were no lines at ticket windows or the main entrance to the Ark. And the silence regarding attendance numbers on opening day (or any day since, for that matter) on the Ark Encounter and Answers in Genesis websites suggest that there isn’t much to boast about.
But that wasn’t our only surprise on opening day. There were at least three others.
We must say that the enormity of the Ark took us by surprise. Of course, we knew it was big. We’d seen the photos and videos online. But walking up to it and standing beneath it—feeling its enormity was something else. And it did raise that pesky question some Christians (and others) have raised about this project. Does it really make sense to spend $150 million (current projected total sticker price) to build that thing? Just think what might have been done with all that cash and all that wood and all that labor if this ginormous thing had not been built.
Another surprise was the carpentry. We knew from our interviews with the two Amish brothers who were organizing much of the Amish laborers who built the Ark, that these men were going to do this right. But to see it was something else. The smooth lines of the hull, bow, and stern made possible by long boards bent and angled into sweeping curves were impressive, to say the least. Inside, what appear to be enormous hand-hewn tree trunks stretch through a central opening from the ground level all the way to the ceiling at the top of the Ark. Even the bolts that hold together big square beams are beautiful.
Given all this, there was yet one more surprise. Beyond the experience of the Ark’s enormity and impressive carpentry, the whole thing was, well, rather underwhelming.
To be sure, there are some interesting life-size dioramas in the Ark (and we will talk about those in a future blog). But much of what the visitor encounters are fake animal cages, fake sacks of grain, and empty ceramic pots along with many two-dimensional placards displaying a lot of text, some graphics, and/or artistic renderings of Bible scenes.
Moreover, the use of space inside the Ark is surprising. For the most part, the interior is broken into five spaces. There are the mostly empty interiors of the bow and stern on each level. There are the two sets of wide ramps at the center of the structure that run most of the length of the Ark. There is the wide walking area that runs along the back of the Ark and provides access to restrooms. And there is a wide walking area that runs along the front of the Ark. On the exterior wall of that walking area are most of the exhibits set one after the other in a long line. Thus, the visitor passes down that long walkway moving in and out of exhibit after exhibit displaying placards that talk about waste removal, lighting on the Ark, how Noah learned to build a ship, flood geology, an ice age, the Tower of Babel, and ancient technologies.
By comparison, we found the use of space inside the Creation Museum (a mere $27 million project) to be far more engaging than the use of space at Ark Encounter. In the Creation Museum, although visitors are obliged to move along a predetermined path, visitors also lose track of where they are within the structure as they go. And the path curves and winds around in ways that are not easily mapped out in one’s mind.
At the Ark, visitors always know where they are since they are always either walking down a long hall with exhibits lined up on one side, walking up a ramp to the next level, or walking down a long hall with restrooms on one side.
Of course, we have every expectation that the gifted designers at AiG will fill many of these now-empty spaces and empty walkways with content at some point. And maybe some of it will be quite engaging. But for now, we remain surprised at how underwhelming (with the exception of the carpentry and some of the dioramas) the interior is.
Underwhelming, at $40 a ticket. Will folks really want to make a return trip soon? Questions about current attendance might not be the only questions facing Ark Encounter.
All about Hell
by William Trollinger
In the course of our work on Righting America at the Creation Museum, we regularly encountered arguments or appeals made by AiG in the museum and beyond that were illogical or implausible. Especially as we worked through the material in the Science chapter, we often found ourselves scratching our heads, trying to figure out how this or that argument actually worked. But no matter how confusing or confounding we found their arguments and appeals initially, we did find that in the end, if we paid attention, we could figure out their point.
The same appears to be true at Ark Encounter.
As visitors proceed through the first two floors of the Ark they are instructed as to how the biblical story of Noah’s Ark makes sense as literal history. They see animal cages, sacks of grain, and ceramic jars; they read placards answering questions such as “How Did Noah Keep the Polar Bears Cool?,” “How Did Freshwater Fish Survive?,” and “What Personal Belongings Did Noah Bring on the Ark?”; they learn about ventilation, lighting, and waste removal on the Ark. And much, much more.
Ark Encounter puts forth a barrage of information, and it is not difficult to imagine some people becoming baffled as to what the point of all this is.
Then visitors enter an exhibit bay dedicated to making the claim that popular “fairy tale” versions of the story of Noah’s Ark undermine the message of the Bible. And just as they enter, they come face to face with a rather menacing looking, three-dimensional red-orange sculpted serpent whose head is stretched out towards them and that appears to have coiled itself around the edges of a placard. It reads:
“If I Can Convince You That the Flood was Not Real, Then I Can Convince You That Heaven and Hell Are Not Real.”
Aha. The point of it all.
And the point is not heaven. Fundamentalists in general and AiG folks in particular don’t have much to say about heaven.
The point is hell. Believe in Noah’s Ark and the global flood and – especially – the drowning of billions of human beings, and you will have no trouble believing in the idea that billions of human beings are going to be damned to the eternal, conscious torment of hell. Doubt the drowning of billions, and you might doubt the burning of billions.
For Ken Ham, his AiG colleagues, and young earth creationists in general the global flood prefigures the hell to come. Damnation and hell are not peripheral aspects of their worldview; damnation and hell are central to their worldview.
There is a good reason why the last chapter of Righting America at the Creation Museum is titled “Judgment,” and why the last section of the last chapter is devoted to “Hell.”
Having visited Ark Encounter, we now realize that what we say about the Creation Museum near the end of Righting America applies equally well to Ark Encounter. So, we reproduce that section here with some edits:
The Creation Museum and Ark Encounter very much reiterate Ken Ham’s emphasis on damnation. In both places the story of the past has been reduced to original sin and the Fall and the spread of pervasive wickedness, followed by the global flood, with the rescue of a tiny remnant and drowning of millions, or now billions, of creatures . . . The past is also prologue to the future. . . . The museum’s and ark’s controlling and repetitive narratives of disobedience and punishment, especially with their emphasis on the global flood and Noah’s Ark, make it clear that judgment . . . for all humanity is forthcoming, and with it the rescue of a faithful remnant and eternal damnation for the rest of humanity. That is to say, for many (perhaps most) human beings the future means hell (224).
In the end, this is what building a life-size ark was all about. Indeed, in the world of AiG, this is what Christianity is all about.
Ark Encounter Doubles Down on Genocide!
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.
Opening Day at Ark Encounter: Surprises, and a Big Surprise
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
We were at the opening of Ark Encounter on July 07. In the next few weeks we will have quite a bit to say about the Ark. This initial post will focus on surprises we encountered in the 48 hours before getting to the Ark, and one big surprise we encountered at the Ark . . . a surprise that may turn out to mean nothing, or may turn out to mean a great deal.
We bought our tickets for opening day of Ark Encounter on January 19. We had tried to buy tickets for the Ken Ham-Bill Nye debate at the Creation Museum, but they sold out in a matter of minutes. We did not want to get shut out again.
Our tickets were very clearly dated — July 7, 2016 — along with the time we could enter the Ark: 9 A.M. When we purchased the tickets we had our choice between purchasing day or evening tickets; we assumed including the time was Ark Encounter’s way of recording that we had purchased day tickets.
Fast forward to the morning of July 5. Our friend Carl Weinberg, historian at Indiana-Bloomington who is finishing up a terrific book on creationism and anti-Communism, informed us that he had just bought an Ark Encounter ticket and would be joining us. We were surprised he could get an opening day ticket, but he said his ticket was undated. He then called the folks at Ark Encounter, who told him his ticket was good for an entire year.
Did this mean opening day would be a first-come, first-served free-for-all? When Carl asked the Ark representative about this, she calmly reported that their plan was to let cars into the parking lot until it was full. When full, it would be shut.
We were alarmed. We became more alarmed when Sue called Ark Encounter on July 6. Instead of getting a human being, she reached a recording which informed her that if she had concerns she could leave her phone number and someone would try to return the call.
The day before the Ark was to open, and a potential visitor could not speak with a customer service representative? It seemed quite possible that Answers in Genesis (AiG) – the parent organization of Ark Encounter – had failed to build the necessary infrastructure to run this over $100 million tourist site.
We agreed to meet Carl at 8 AM, one hour before the Ark was to open. But as we were driving down I-75 we wondered if we shouldn’t have planned to get there even earlier.
Then we arrived. All was well. Driving into the gigantic parking lot could not have been smoother. Friendly, helpful parking attendants waved us into the appropriate spot and then pointed us to the ticket offices. We walked over and got into one of two fairly long lines of people waiting for the Ark to open. Some were wearing T-shirts with phrases such as “Jesus is my Ark,” “God Created and I Believe,” and “I’ve got Glitter in my Veins, Jesus in my Heart.” Carl showed up a few minutes later, and we stood and chatted while we waited for the Ark to open.
When the Ark opened the lines moved smoothly and fairly rapidly. We produced our tickets, a friendly Ark employee scanned them, and then more helpful attendants ushered us to a waiting shuttle that transported us from the parking lot/ticket office to the Ark. We got off the shuttle. More friendly and helpful workers helped us proceed to the entrance of the Ark. And all of this friendliness and helpfulness and smoothness continued inside the Ark.
In short, there was no chaos. That was a surprise. But that was not the big surprise.
While we were moving through the line at the Ark ticket office we noticed that there were people who were purchasing tickets. We could have waited until July 7 to buy our tickets. But the lines were long, our shuttle bus was full, and so we thought little of it.
As we headed to our shuttle bus at 12:20pm or so – after spending the morning in the Ark and after a brief interview with a Cincinnati television station – we were a bit taken aback by the fact that incoming shuttle buses seemed nearly empty. When we were dropped off at the parking lot, and we walked by the ticket offices, we noticed that there was no one at a ticket window. The offices were open – one ticket seller hailed us, thinking we wanted to buy tickets – but no one was there. Not one person.
We returned after lunch, just to check things out. There were a few – not many – people at ticket windows.
Then we noticed the parking lot. The Ark Encounter parking lot is really a collection of connected parking lots, and they are huge. And a number of these large lots were absolutely empty. And it was opening day.
We have no idea what all this means. We have no idea how many people visited Ark Encounter on opening day, given that – and this is also surprising – we have seen (as of Friday evening, July 8) no attendance numbers. We have no idea how big the crowds will be this weekend.
Our big surprise may mean nothing. It may mean a great deal. We have no idea.
But it seems we understand why they abandoned the idea of selling tickets that were specifically designated for opening day. No need.
Death Outside the Ark . . . Made Vivid
by Susan Trollinger
As noted in our last post, Ark Encounter (which opens July 7) offers visitors a life-size opportunity to experience the story of eight people and 2000 animals snugly situated on a boat while – according to Answers in Genesis (AiG) – millions or billions of people and animals were drowning in the global flood raging outside. In this sense, Ark Encounter is a massively expanded and “brought-to-life” version of perhaps the darkest room in the Creation Museum, the Voyage of the Ark room.
That room contains a miniature diorama in which men, women, children, and animals are stranded upon or frantically trying to climb to the peaks of mountain tops (all that remains above the fast-rising flood waters) to escape their certain death. While some folks are sprawled onto the rock, perhaps unconscious, those standing are flailing their arms as they desperately signal the Ark, begging for their rescue. The Ark floats by, sealed off from their distress as there are no windows. The only opening—the door through which Noah’s family and the animals entered—can be seen, but it is shut. An accompanying placard explains that God has shut the Ark’s door, thus ending “any opportunity for people outside . . . to be saved.”
In Righting America (pp. 54-56) we have more to say about this diorama, and provide a photograph. But also in the Voyage of the Ark room – and about which we say little in the book – is an equally troubling video that plays on a composite set of four flat screens. One sees various computer-generated animations of the Earth in the process of being consumed by the Flood. The seams of the Earth appear to split open from the North Pole to the South, and the Flood waters burst forth swallowing all land in giant walls of water. Inset clocks indicate that all this happens very quickly. What makes this all so vivid is the scene of what appears to be a mother and daughter in Middle Eastern dress sitting inside a house and contentedly playing a game of Mancala . . . and through the window one sees a wall of water rapidly advancing on the blissfully unaware pair. Within a matter of seconds, they will be desperately trying to keep their heads above the raging waters. Within a matter of minutes, they will be dead.
There is a bench positioned in front for comfortable viewing. From our seven visits to the museum we can say that it is a compelling video. We have a photo from 2012 of six middle-aged and elderly white women – two on the bench, two in chairs behind the bench, two standing nearby – attentively watching the wall of water approaching the house.
What makes all this even darker is that the Voyage Room, within which these scenes of both global (the whole Earth) and personal (a mother and child) destruction appear, was constructed in such an appealing way. The floors, walls, and ceiling of this room are all covered in beautiful wood stained a warm golden color. Life-size baskets filled with food for the journey wait in corners of the room for use as miniature dioramas depict idyllic family scenes wherein Noah, his wife, and children dine together amidst beautiful tapestries and hand-woven rugs or feed the animals from abundant sacks of grain (Righting America, 56-58).
Life on the Ark appears to be good, very good. And visitors are positioned by the room itself to experience that warmth, peace, love, and goodness.
Yet just beyond its golden stained walls, a mother and child suffer. The whole world suffers.
What a curious and callous juxtaposition.
Noah’s Flood: The Drowning of Billions
by William Trollinger
Answers in Genesis (AiG) recently posted a brief article in which they addressed the question as to how many people were on earth at the time of the global Flood.
According to the folks at AiG, “some people believe the population was relatively low” (whatever that means) because of “wars, diseases, and other factors.” However, if the population growth rate in the pre-Flood world – that is, in the years between 4004 and 2348 BCE – was “equal to the growth rate in 2000, there could have been about 750 million people at the time of the Flood.” But “given the extremely long lifespans prior to the Flood, the growth rate could have been much higher,” and thus the population could have been “close to four billion at the Flood” (Emphases ours).
What? The Earth’s population may have been upwards of four billion in the year 2348 BCE? Even AiG’s more modest suggestion of 750 million people is jaw-dropping, given that scholars have concluded that in year 1 CE – 2348 years later! – the global population was approximately 170 million.
There is much to be said here about what counts as logic for AiG. For now, note the unnamed author’s matter-of-fact tone in telling the story of global slaughter, in casually (even callously) suggesting the possibility that between 749,999,992 and 3,999,999,992 human beings drowned in the Flood, the Flood that young earth creationists use to wash away mainstream geology.
Here are some questions that folks outside the world of young earth creationism would find reasonable to ask about this scenario:
- If even just a few hundred of these millions/billions of people had heeded Noah’s warning of global flood, how would they have fit on the Ark?
- Did every one of these millions/billions of people receive Noah’s warning?
- Did every one of these millions/billions of people deserve to drown?
- Did the millions and millions of infants and small children deserve to drown?
- When the flood waters started to rise, did the eight people on the Ark hear the screams of the drowning people?
- As the eight people on the Ark ate their dinner or went to sleep at night, did they think about the fact that outside the walls of their boat millions/billions of people were dying a horrific death?
- When the Ark came to rest, and the eight people ventured forth, did they shriek in horror at the sight of the skeletal remains of billions of people and animals?
Of course, for AiG the future Judgment is as important as the past Judgment. As the article’s unnamed author observes in the concluding paragraph: “Earth currently has about seven billion inhabitants. How many of them will be judged with eternal condemnation if the Lord were to return soon?”
Approximately 31% of the world’s population is affiliated with Christianity. Let’s leave aside that fact that some percentage of these individuals would not meet an evangelical definition of “Christian.” According to AiG, if the end of history came this year at least 4.8 billion individuals would be cast into a hell where they would consciously endure eternal torment (Righting America, pp. 224-225).
Here, then, is the message of Ark Encounter. The righteous drowning of millions/billions of human beings prefigures the righteous burning of billions of human beings.
Quite the tourist site.
Why I Abandoned Belief in a Literal Creation
by Rodney Kennedy
Many Baptists — including Jimmy Carter — fled or were forced out of the Southern Baptist Convention when the fundamentalist forces secured control in the 1980s. As one of those whom the Southern Baptist fundamentalists could not abide, Dr. Kennedy has been very interested in the Righting America project from its inception, especially as he has watched young earth creationism sweep through his former denomination.
At a cocktail party a Catholic theologian asked me, “How did you ever manage to escape your fundamentalist upbringing?” The question has been flung at me by friends and enemies alike over the years. I have never taken the time to give any kind of reasoned explanation, so I have decided to provide a snapshot of how I came to reject creationism, literalism, and fundamentalism.
I grew up in the culture of biblical literalism. But by the time I was twelve I knew there were problems. I asked my Sunday school teacher why there were two creation stories in the first two chapters of Genesis. She didn’t know and told me not be a smart aleck. Then I asked why God said “Let there be light,” but didn’t create the sun until the third day. My teacher told me that God was God and could make light come out of his eyes. Nice mythological touch.
Once I read Genesis 1 – 11 in its entirety, I realized the story of creation was lumped with an array of really strange stories. For example, after murdering his brother, Abel, Cain “settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” Then in the next verse, “Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch.” Now, my Sunday school teachers taught me that there were originally two people on earth, Adam and Eve, who had two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel and then there were only three.
There is no literal way Cain could have found a wife because there were no wives to be had. Over the years, members of Baptist churches I served struggled with this story. Mostly they ignored it, but if one of the deacons got drunk on a Saturday night, and his usually repressed mind got loose, he would show up at the parsonage at 4:00am, ring the doorbell, and barge in the door asking me, “Rev., now tell me the truth. Where did Cain’s wife come from?”
[Note: If the drunk deacon had gone to the Creation Museum instead of Dr. Kennedy’s parsonage, he would have learned that Adam and Eve also had daughters, and thus Cain married his sister. As explained on a placard at the museum, “marriage ‘between close relatives was not a problem in early biblical history,’ as long as ‘it was one man for one woman (the biblical doctrine of marriage.)’” Righting, 176-177.]
My tattered ship of literalism shattered against the rocks of Genesis 6. There is not a stranger story in the Bible than the sons of God lusting after the daughters of men, and then coming down from heaven and mating with them. Then we read, “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days . . . These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.” Move over Iliad and Odyssey!
But next was the story of God being angry, angry enough to destroy the world by flood. The story – the ark, the animals, the flood — has never made any sense to me. The instructions about how many of each species was to enter the ark were confusing and contradictory. As soon as I learned that other cultures had flood stories, I consigned the biblical one to the pre-historical myth section of my mind.
Then there were the death records. Adam died when he was 800 years old. Methuselah died when he was 969 years old. A six-day creation or a 969 year-old person: this was not historical evidence.
And so it went, layer after layer of literalism, peeled away from my belief system. And all this time the literalists in my tribe – the Southern Baptists – were adding tortured layer after tortured layer of alleged proof for their manufactured system of literalism. Turns out creationism is a lie supported by multiple lies that are deeply rooted in a harsh rationalism and a deep commitment to a kind of theological positivism that went out of style a century ago but to this day props up the Southern Baptist kingdom.
And that is I how I abandoned fundamentalism and settled in the land of the Yankees. My Southern Baptist brethren would not abide my presence as an infidel, heathen, and heretic. Thanks be to God!
Rodney Kennedy has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University and 45 years of preaching experience. Among other publications, he is co-author of Will Campbell: Preacher of Reconciliation (Cascade, 2015) and co-editor of Baptists Gathering for the Work of Worship (Pickwick, 2013).
