Creation Museum (part 3)
“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes.”
– Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, cleric
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And now we come to Part Three of my series on the Creation Museum, wherein we learn of the Great Flood and Noah's Ark. If you're joining us late, first read Part One and Part Two.
In Part Two, we saw the Garden of Eden, and learned the lesson of not eating from the wrong tree. The last we saw of Eve, she was barefoot and pregnant as Adam was out working for a living.
Sadly, that wasn't enough to make people behave well. In fact, they behaved so badly that God decided to kill them all. You know the rest: he told Noah to build a big boat.
There is one thing here I found surprising: I thought the contention was that the dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't get tickets for the Ark. (Because they were too big, or too dangerous, or no one liked them, or whatever.) But, no – dinosaurs were on the Ark. The Bible says “all,” not “all but the dinosaurs,” and that's that: T-Rex on the Ark.
These folks are sitting around laughing at what a moron Noah is for building a huge boat nowhere near any water. Of course, we know the joke is on them.
This part of the story always strikes me as particularly cruel. Noah was told by God that the world was to be destroyed in a flood: of course he believed it. Everyone else was told so by a crazy old dude building a boat miles from any water. You wouldn't believe him, either.
Here's Noah, having a cold one after a hard day of Ark building.
The Ark was 510 feet long, slightly shorter than a Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet tall. So, for his time, Noah was one heck of a ship builder.
A Ticonderoga class cruiser carries a crew of about 400, and that's Navy-style accommodations with tiny bunks. Somehow, Noah had to fit two of every animal on that thing. Including Tyrannosaurus rex.
A cutaway model of the Ark.
The quality of the Ark models is really quite impressive.
This isn't camera-angle trickery: this is a life-size Ark segment you can walk through.
It makes the Ark seem very large – but large enough to fit everything that needed to fit?
Here, we have the animals boarding the Ark in an orderly fashion.
Why do depictions of this scene always feature giraffes and elephants? Never the earthworms or slugs?
The question of how Noah could have rounded up all these animals and gotten them to cooperate by boarding the Ark is given a pass: God brought the animals to Noah, so Noah didn't have to do that himself.
And the water rose, and the Ark set sail.
Apparently, building the Ark on high ground enabled it to survive the onset of the Flood. By the time it was set afloat, the initial ravages of the rising water, and the ensuing tsunamis, were over with, and the ship could avoid crashing into mountains or anything else that might damage it.
Here we see victims of the First Genocide, desperately clawing their way to higher ground, pleading to be allowed onto the Ark. Noah sails away in his floating petting zoo, laughing, as millions die around him.
What a horrifying scene to subject children to. After this, won't they need further indoctrination to re-convince them that this God is capable of any love at all?
Luckily, indoctrination stations are mere steps away from that terrible scene.
Got some tough questions you'd like to ask Noah? Meet Interactive Noah: he moves and talks and answers your questions about the Ark. Naturally, he doesn't answer just any question; there is a list of pre-defined questions you can choose from on a touchscreen monitor.
One of the questions is the Big One, the one about fitting all those animals on the Ark. This is where we get into the Museum's concept of animal “kinds.” The contention is that all the variety of animal life can be reduced to a small number of “kinds,” and you only need two of any “kind” because the variety is pre-programmed into the DNA of all “kind” members.
Thus, you need only two dogs, and those dogs will automatically produce all the various dog breeds as well as wolves and coyotes very quickly.
So, the entire animal kingdom is reduced to only a couple hundred of these “kinds,” which supposedly makes it possible for them all to fit on the Ark.
No scientific evidence is presented for this notion of “kinds.” It's stated as though it were an established idea.
Just so it's clear: it's not.
Noah's family tends the animals on the Ark.
The sanitation problem alone must have been overwhelming. I guess you could just throw the “waste” overboard. But they didn't know about germs and how diseases spread back then: maybe they just got lucky.
But here's something Interactive Noah won't answer: all those animals crammed in to that Ark needed to eat. Noah had to fit food for all those animals on board, in addition to the animals themselves. And some of those animals eat quite a lot: remember, there are dinosaurs aboard.
They were stuck on that boat for months. Months worth of food for all those animals? Really?
The water recedes, and the Ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
Biblical literalists continue to scour these mountains for remains of the Ark. Unfortunately they don't know exactly which mountain it was, and they haven't found anything yet.
The Flood is taken to explain all sorts of things, from fossils to the Grand Canyon.
All the fossils we find today were buried at the same time, by the Flood. There was so much water that everything came to rest in all the various layers of earth, the layers scientists have determined were created over millions of years.
The existence of fossils of sea animals above sea level is taken as evidence of this, rather than evidence of shifting continents and changing seas.
The Grand Canyon, the Museum insists, was created in a matter of months by the waters of the Flood.
The evidence presented for this: flowing water in a rain storm can create tiny “canyons” in the mud in a very short time – so, obviously, all it takes to create the Grand Canyon that quickly is more water.
Here we have an illustration of how geological layers are really just a result of the Flood burying everything in a very short period of time.
“Nevermind science – you've seen rain erode mud in your own back yard, so obviously the Grand Canyon is the same thing.”
The physical features of the continents that weren't created by the Flood are explained by the receding waters of the flood washing away excess sediment and carving out natural features of the landscape – again, in a matter of days or weeks.
Darwinian natural selection is presented as a misunderstood concept that couldn't possibly result in organisms evolving into very different animals – because that's not possible. The animal “kinds” are what they are, and they can change and adapt within their “kind” but not beyond that.
The contention is that natural selection doesn't have the qualities required for the idea of “evolution.” And, of course, that evolution is merely an opinion, rather than a scientifically demonstrated theory.
Of course, the usual problem is that people fail, willfully or otherwise, to understand what the word “theory” means in science. So, they derisively dismiss evolution as “just a theory” without understanding the inherent absurdity of what they're saying.
The notion of a “tree” of evolution of life is just man's opinion, while the Bible's “orchard” results in these “kinds” of animals that can only diversify to a certain degree. Despite the “kind” idea being presented over and over as some kind of known quantity, it of course is not based on any observable science whatsoever.
Classification of animals into “species” is dismissed as a man-made idea, as if this “kind” nonsense isn't.
And here we end Part Three. Check back soon for the fourth and final installment of this Creation Museum visit, which, naturally, will contain lots and lots of dinosaurs.
UPDATES: Part 4
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But we begin with Methuselah. Methuselah is the oldest person on record, having lived to be 969 years old. He died seven days before the Flood.
Recall that Noah was 600 years old at the time of the Flood, and lived another 350 years thereafter. So he missed the record by a mere 19 years.
The human lifespan has dropped by ninety percent in the intervening years. The Museum offers no explanation for this alarming development.