Ken Ham and the Answers in Genesis organisation, built a 'live size' Noahs's Ark in Kentucky, USA. Basically the "Ark Encounter" is a large themepark, based on the biblical tale of Noah's flood. There is a lot of controversy surrounding the "Ark Encounter". There have been all kinds of reports of possible tax evasion, poor working conditions and discrimination, based on religious beliefs. Ofcourse all these things are quite bad. But I'm not going to adress these issues today. Today, I want to look at the story behind the themepark, to see if there is any credibility to be given to both the Ark park and the biblical tale.
Are the answers in Genesis correct?
In the book of Genesis, from chapter 6 through chapter 9 the bible explains how God punished humanity with a 'global' flood and only allowed 1 family of humans and a select amount of animals to survive this flood.
The story however raises a lot of questions and Ken Ham even beliefs there are Answers in Genesis, to such an extend that he even named his organsation exactly that. But is there any validity to these answers? Does it answer the additional questions it raises? And even more importantly, does the book of Genesis prove Ken Ham's interpretation to be correct? Well, there will be no surprise. The answer is quite simply No.
The impossibility of Noah's Ark
For convenience sake, I'm going to surpass the whole flood story. Wether or not there actually was a global biblical flood (again, the answer is 'No') is a whole different story. Showing the impossibility of the Ark alone, already shows any such flood could not have happend or that it couldn't have been survived by 8 people and thousands of animals on just 1 ship. There are three main reasons why Noah's Ark can not have existed.
These three main reasons are: manpower and timespan, feeding and caring for all the animals and keeping the ship afloat. The impossibility concerning these reasons are best shown by comparing the Ark with a more modern 17th century ship.
Comparing Noah's Ark to a 17th century East Indiaman vessel
In the 17th century the Dutch East India company had several types of ships, they sent from the Netherlands to Asia, to do trade. These ranged from full on battle ships to cargo ships. One of the biggest type of ships was the East Indiaman ship, like the "Batavia", which sank on it's maiden voyage. But the size and capacity can be compared to that of Noahs Ark, in order to show why the Ark could not have existed.
Length: 160 foot
Width: 36 foot
Height 39 foot (hull)
Content: 225000 cubic foot
Capacity: 341 men
Cargo: 800 tonnes
For it's time, this was a sizeable ship, which raises a huge problem for Noah and his family. Why? Well, it took 300 men somewhere about 9 months to 1 year to build such a ship. This would translate to roughly 1 million manhours of construction time. And that is without counting the time needed to produce all the building materials.
So, let's compare this, to Noah's ark. The information about the ship was provided by Answers in Genesis. They mention the dimensions of the ship on the Ark Encounter website. From the size of the ship compared to the Batavia, we can calculate the rest.
Length: 510 foot
Width: 85 foot
Height: 50 foot
Content: 2167500 cubic foot
These dimensions are a whopping 9,6 times the dimensions of the Batavia. This would roughly mean, that the capacity of the Ark would be 3274 'man equivalent' and about 7680 tonnes of cargo. This doesn't seem to be that much.
But that isn't the biggest problem. Let's just say, and I am being very generous here, that it would have taken 9.6 times as long to build the ship aswell. That would mean it would have taken Noah and his family not 1 million hours to build this ship, but 9,6 million hours. There were only 8 people in Noah's family, including himself, so it would take just about 1.2 million hours per person.
With 12 hours per day, not counting any sundays because of the sabbath, that would be a whopping 320 years it would take for Noah and his family to build the Ark. Even if they were to work on sundays, this would still be 274 years. And this is without them even gathering all the building materials and preparing that before construction.
This is utterly impossible. The amount of time is such, that there would also be no time to gather any food for themselves and the animals, during the time they were on the Ark and for the initial time after the flood.
Elephants and rodents disprove the Ark
Even if, miraculously, the Ark was built, then still there would be the task of feeding the animals and cleaning their holding pens. With thousands of animals, this also forms a problem. Let's just look at how much elephants eat and how fast rodents reproduce.
Elephants eat for about 18 hours per day. In 5 days 1 Elephant consumes about 1 tonne of food. The time Noah and the animals were on the Ark was about 380 days. This means 1 Elephant would have consumed 75 tonnes of food during its time on the Ark. That is about 0.85% of the total cargo capacity of the ship. Ofcourse the smaller animals would eat less. But they have other issues. Like Rats and Mice have.
Rats and Mice can repopulate from the amount of 2 to 15000 in just 1 year. Starting with 2 Rats and 2 Mice, after 382 days there could have been about 30000 Rats and Mice on board of the Ark. They could chew through wood and reek havoc on board with regards to the food supply.
Besides the amounts of food and the reproductive rates of the animals, there is the issue with Noah and his family caring for the ship and the animals. How are they going to feed all of them. Just feeding the Elephants would have taken a consideral amount of their time and they were only 8 people. How did they find the time to clean the holding pens and to rid the ship of the manure? This also seems utterly impossible.
Keeping a wooden ship afloat disproves the Ark
Even if the Ark, miraculously, was built and Noah and his family, miraculously, found the time to feed and care for all the animals, then there still are other tasks on board to be performed. Like keeping it afloat.
Going back to the East indiaman ship, this had atleast 2 pumps. As the ship is made of wood, it will leak. The Ark was 9.6 times bigger than the Batavia. So, it would need about 9.6 times the pumping capacity the Batavia had. More pumps means more people are needed to pump, or less people are available to care for the animals. This would definitely compromise the daily operation on board of the ship.
With 40 days and 40 nights of rain, followed by better weather, where the ship would be exposed to sunlight, damaging radiation, wind and waves, there would be maintenance needed, just to keep the vessel afloat. With 8 people there just would not be enough manpower. The Batavia, 9.6 times smaller than the Ark had a crew of 303 men and 38 passengers. Keeping the Ark afloat with 8 people just seems utterly impossible.
Ken Ham's Ark Encounter interpretation of Noah's flood did not happen
Besides these obvious problems with Noah's Ark, there are many more in Ken Ham's Ark Encounter interpretations of Noah's flood. Like them having Dinosaurs on board of the ship. This is a whole different level of impossible. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that Dinosaurs were alive during that time.
They also suggest that after the flood the animals spread over the world and had some sort of rapid adaptation process, which led to a vast array of different breeds and species of animals. The time span is way to short for this to have happend.
There are so incredibly many things wrong with the whole story, that it is impossible for any aspect of it to have happend. Nothing known to man, other than the bible, suggest a global flood to have happend. So, no, Ken Ham's Ark Encounter doesn't have any credibility, with regards to the flood story.
I can only think of one event that may qualify as a "global flood" and that would have been the "snowball earth", somewhere between 650 and 720 million years ago. But we'll leave that topic for another day.
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