As a card-carrying YEC (voting member of the Creation Research Society), I don’t think the Ark Encounter project is viable, nor do I think it is a wise use of God’s money. I speculate it may go insolvent in short order. Just a guess….
170,000,000 for an amusement park? Do you know what guys like Rob Carter, Walter Brown, John Sanford, Don Johnson, the Discovery Institute could do with money like that?
Seeing an amusement park doesn’t make Noah any more real to me than going to Disney world makes Tinkerbell more real. Sorry for my cynicism, but that’s how I feel. Faith in the truthfulness of Noah’s flood comes elsewhere, not from big amusement parks.
Here is a photo 14:30 opening day:
https://twitter.com/MrAtheistPants/status/751127116960428032/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The other thing, in creationist circles I mingle in. I hardly hear anyone saying, “Oh I can’t wait to see the Ark.” There are lots of other places like baseball games where YEC parents are eager to take their YEC kids for fun.
Here is another observation:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wwjtd/2016/07/a-fun-day-at-ark-encounters-grand-opening/
News reports say attendance was around 4,000 today. Of course, that’s not sustainable. But let’s imagine it was. That comes out to 1,460,000 attendees in the course of a year. That’s nowhere near what they promised, it assumes there are no days the park is closed, and it assumes attendance will continue to be at least as good as on opening day with all the hype and advertising.
Here is a supposed photo of the ticket line, I have no reason to doubt its authenticity. Should I doubt it? We’ll find out if Ark Encounter goes bankrupt:
https://twitter.com/MrAtheistPants/status/751130524949905408/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Looking at some of the photos of the Ken Ham’s Ark, this looks awful.
https://twitter.com/mattstonephotog/status/751019902203523073/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
I just as soon go to a farm or zoo if I wanted to see animals being fed. And beside zoos look more humane for animals than the cramped quarters of the ark. If you want to see the horrors Noah went through to survive the flood, the real Ark would have been the place. So the concept of this place being a fun place (an amusement park) is not so wise from the start since any semblance of what the Ark might have been like would have been one of incredible hardship.
The Ark Encounter project may do one thing, it may show how infeasible it is to feed and manage all those animals without a miracle. My reading of the flood account is that God miraculously provided for Noah in the ark to keep all those animals alive. As it said, “God shut him [Noah] in [the ark]”. The ark was miraculously protected on the inside and outside. I suspect lots of animals went into God-induced hibernation (pure speculation on my part).
So, I’m sorry, I can’t bring myself to pray for the Ark Encounter project anymore than I’d pray for an unwise endeavor. There are lots of Christian causes in much dire need of attention and money like the International Justice Mission, which I support:
https://www.ijm.org/
In some sense, I’ve desperately hoped creationists would stop supporting stuff like Ark Encounter. You want to donate to YEC or creationist causes? I recommend CRS for YEC and Discovery Institute for ID. I support both.
Sal,
Out of curiosity, I ask where it does come from.
What is God’s money?
phoodoo,
The money people give to him, since he’s apparently incapable of earning any on his own.
Sal,
Why would you believe all of that when a much more plausible explanation is available? Namely, that the story is fictional.
Ken Ham may be counting on something similar if the crowds don’t show up.
There is money for ID, but nobody wants to take it. So this is simply untrue. For example, look at the ‘kinds’ thread. Why would anyone want to give money to research something that it’s proponents can’t even be bothered to defend?
So what could the Discovery Institute do with money like that? What would they fund? Is it your claim that ID has suffered because of the lack of funds? Why do you say that? What ID projects have gone unfunded?
etc etc.
I suspect that the animals were all miraculously shrunk so they fit in the Ark and didn’t need a lot of food (pure speculation on my part).
God can do anything he needs to do (cleansing the world in a targetted manner not being something he needed to do, hence all the elaborate shenanigans).
Allan,
God likes collateral damage.
Evidence of the flood comes from the fossil record when accurately reported and analyzed.
Jesus testified of Noah being real, and so did the apostles. To the extent the witness in the handed down texts is credible, is the extent Jesus is who he said he was, and if he is who he said he was, he is God.
A nationally recognized cold case detective concluded Jesus was who he said he was:
🙂
Ham should have been more honest about reporting the likely declining ticket sales at the creation museum. The true numbers had been withheld for years after ticket sales declined 4 straight years in a row.
The Ark Encounter junk bonds will likely go insolvent. That was plain as day to the investment outfit that independently audited the numbers.
In contrast, I gave my free-of-charge, transparent money making idea here which would have made money for anyone who made the trade described:
Isn’t it great when you can always invoke miracles to overcome unfeasability?
What a nice god you believe in, that goes to extreme lengths to keep animals alive but does nothing to help babies born with horrible lethal mutations… some creationists even claim God produces those mutations.
There were only probably a few of them and maybe the dinosaurs weren’t on the ark. The rest of the creatures on the ark were the beginning of “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful [which] have been, and are being, evolved.”
The creationist geneticists are interested in tracing the phylogeny of the creatures to identify which Baramin were on the ark. YECs are hyper evolutionists.
I alerted some of my associates about PHYLIP, told them it was used for Y-chromosomal Aaron ( the Cohen modal haplotype). PHYLIP or something like it was used for to identify the Abraham Modal Haplotype which points to Biblical Abraham who was only 500 years after Noah.
The Bible claims people stopped living so long after the Great flood. This would suggest then rapid mutational changes. The discrepancy between Y-Abraham and Y-Noah (some call Y-Adam) is at least consistent with the claim of large scale mutation induced deterioration.
Rob Carter did a genetics study on migration patterns. I wonder what software tools he used. He determined there was not an out-of-Africa migration, but rather an out-of-Mesopotamia (aka out of Babel) migration. Phylogenetic methods can possibly reconstruct some of the details the migration. I mentioned PHYLIP to some of the members of the YEC Mendel’s Accountant team yesterday. I hope the team starts thinking about studying PHYLIP and similar tools.
Like for the origin of life or the origin of Eukaryotes or the origin of the universe? Sometimes you have to invoke them as a matter of principle.
I think the geological evidence points to a great cataclysmic flood in the recent past. The Noah account is not necessary to make that inference, but the fact a great flood is recorded in Bible strengthens the historical credibility of this ancient story.
There is interest in the MRCA status of all species. Doggie mtEVE and cattle mtEVE are at least consistent with the flood. Baraminologists and geneticists should be interested in mtEVE of lions or non-domesticated animals. The flood account leads to testable hypotheses.
Btw, regarding the Abraham modal haplotypes discrepancy with Y-Adam(Noah), if we see the same kind of discrepancy in other species lines (radically different numbers between the Y-lines vs the mtDNA lines), this will also lend credibility to the Noah account in the Bible.
No. All one needs to do is to be humble enough to admit we just don’t know. Funny how you guys always demand others to humbly believe in God and his miracles: He’s too grand to comprehend. Well, we simply choose to be humble one crucial step before assuming explanations that can’t explain anything.
Looking at the cramped quarters, the need for hibernation is likely because the Ark was dark, not well-lit by electric lights in Ken Ham’s reconstruction. Creatures being locked up in the dark for a year? Peta would be livid.
That problem came to mind as I looked at photos of Ken Ham (not Noah’s) ark.
I said I don’t know for sure, but I find it believable. Maybe my faith is child-like, but I find it unbelievable life is a mindless accident, so that’s why I believe in miracles.
Something made life as well as all the troubles we see in this troubled world.
Yes, just like when you also invoke miracles for those. Isn’t it weird having to caricature your own position like that constantly?
stcordova,
Can you estimate a mutation rate in the ballpark of what would be necessary to explain the current biodiversity if all living forms descend from a few “kind” members 4000 years ago?
stcordova,
Adults believing in the literal truth of the Ark. Beyond the reach of reason.
Why? I mean short of the deliberate rethoric (mindless accident), why can’t life be the result of a natural process? Obviously you pick the words “mindless accident” to make it sound ridiculous, but then it isn’t inherently ridiculous, you’ve just constructed a caricature for yourself to laugh at. There is no argument there that shows life evolving to be ridiculous.
I don’t believe life is a “mindless accident”, but I also don’t believe it’s just wished into existence fully formed. So if we can dispence with silly caricatures deliberately designed to skip all the details of a true scientific account and instead sound ridiculous and, for a moment, and perhaps make an effort to explain why it is “unbelievable” that life somehow evolved?
Really? How do you know that?
Which is the same thing as saying that he believes a mind created life. Put a negative in there and pretend it’s not begging the question anymore
As to the financials, here were the declining ticket sales reported for the Creation Museum:
Then AiG stopped releasing the figures after that! What’s the matter, they don’t want to tell donors the project is in decline because they want to solicit six times more money! Declining interest in the Creation Museum is not something one wants to admit if one wants to give the impression God is blessing the Creation Museum project and will bless Ark Encounter even more, and therefore donors should keep sending donations and buying junk bonds that may go insolvent.
Then I hear they expect 2,000,000 visitors a year for Ark Encounter?
Let me extrapolate a little. The declining creation museum ticket sales could be say in the ball park of 200K or less. Why should anyone then expect Ark Encounter will go to 2 million visitors annually?
There are demographic considerations. The grand opening was on July 7, 2016, a Thursday. Kids are out of school in the USA in the summertime. Grand opening under favorable conditions got at best 4000 in attendance. Why no reports of the actual figures? In the computer age we can know these things rather easily. 4000 a day will not meet projections of annual visits, and certainly no exceed them.
The lack of attendance will not bode well for the regular school year and work week. Drawing 2,000,000 visitors a year hard to believe considering Disney world has 20,000,000 visitors throughout the year and Disney world is designed for maximum entertainment with all sorts of rides and real amusements.
The decline in interest in the creation museum is indicative that it wasn’t a fun experience, although admittedly the economy has been in bad shape during the Obama years.
Travelling hundreds of miles to Kentucky from other parts of the USA just to see the creation museum or ark is a family affair and should be worth the price to amuse the kids. This is an amusement park right.
How many families want to travel hundreds of miles, take off work, and only when school is out to see this (below). Buy the kids a video game. They’ll have more fun, better benefit to cost ratio. If one wants to spend hundreds on hotel and air fair, go to a real amusement park like Disney World!
Actually, it’s creationists/IDists who complain about spending money to study these to find out what happened, because they already “know” that it was miracles, and we don’t accept such flim-flam.
But Sal states and restates wrong claims repeatedly because he has nothing but flim-flam to substitute for knowledge.
Glen Davidson
That’s what I think about believe birds evolving from fish without a miracle. At least it would be more honest to admit a miracle is needed when it really is needed than to pretend some features of the world naturally arise.
If Jesus is who he says he was as testified in the gospels, he is God, and if Jesus testified of Noah then Noah was real.
But as I pointed out, according to Pascal’s wager, there is little to lose by supposing it is true. What does believing that birds arose from fish gain you if it true?
Suppose the chances of Noah and the Bible being credible is 0.0001%, in light of the potential payoffs and losses (practically none), it is the right wager.
I was an evolutionist. I learned about it in public school. The more I considered the matter, the less believable it sounded. The irony is that the more outrageous story, that of special creation and a recent flood, became more and more believable the more I pondered the matter.
When I looked into the faint young sun paradox problem and other issues, that told me the millions of years interpretation of the fossil record is highly suspect. One can’t run away from astrophysical considerations:
This is an article by a professional astronomer who once taught at a secular university (University North Carolina Chapel Hill):
Faint Young Sun Paradox
So, nothing personal Allan, but what superficially sounded believable to me as a child in evolutionary theory, now sounds more ridiculous every day, no less ridiculous than claims that Jesus rose from the dead and that there was Noah’s flood. At least there is an associated payoff if Noah’s flood is correct, there is no payoff if evolutionary theory is correct. According to Pascal’s wager, betting on the truth of Jesus and by extension Noah’s flood is a better more rational bet.
I suspect that the ark was shrunk and placed in a bathtub and everything on it was placed in suspended animation until shortly before Noah sent the raven out to seek for dry land.
Because what else is there to do but speculate about miracles when one is creationist/IDist?
Glen Davidson
Well, unless you care about evidence.
Which you don’t.
You know, no one really cares what you think is “ridiculous,” as you’re never capable of making a solid case about anything, from the ark to “mechanical unfeasibility.” All that you manage to accomplish amounts to “testimony” about your inability to comprehend and think through things.
Glen Davidson
stcordova,
None of that really follows, as an argument.
Absolutely nothing. Why does it need to gain me anything? I consider it true on the evidence. It does not appear to me to require anything miraculous.
As to Pascal’s Wager, I can no more make myself believe that the Ark was real, when the notion is so shot full of holes, than anything else. God would certainly see through the subterfuge. If, on the other hand, God is the kind of petty fuckwit that would punish someone for what they believe, screw him.
Have you ever considered geocentrism and flat-earthism, Sal?
Just curious
stcordova,
Most of that CO2 is locked up in fossil shells of various kinds. As I have pointed out before, even if every atom of biologically-located carbon on earth now were converted into limestone, it would account for the merest fraction of limestone remaining on earth (itself clearly a fraction of that lost). You have a real problem of stoichiometry. Which of course you could just explain by ‘miracle’, but one would wonder why you gave a damn about naturalistic data anyway? That is the fundamental weirdness of Creationism to me.
Um, well, there’s practical information. Also, satisfaction regarding the consilience of knowledge, vs. the piecemeal treatment of piles of facts that creationists/IDists demand in the stead of coherent knowledge.
Kind of what one gains from understanding plate tectonics as well.
To be sure, Sal means something else, as he provides no hint of ever having just regarded origins information in a relatively “objective” manner at all. Indeed, he went from ignorant evolutionist to ignorant creationist thinking that birds coming from fish is ridiculous. He’s proud that he came to that tendentious and emotional “conclusion,” before ever seriously looking at evolutionary evidence. It was never “what can we learn from the evidence,” it was always about ridicule, attack of unwelcome ideas, and resort to whatever sounds best to him.
We don’t gain a lot materially from recognizing that birds evolved from fish, but we do gain knowledge and a degree of practical benefits from evolutionary theory at large, as it streamlines knowledge acquisition. Sal doesn’t care about either one, I know, and neither comes close to promising eternal life, but there are benefits from actually caring about the evidence rather than forcing everything to fit one’s emotional and wishful thinking.
Glen Davidson
No, it does not. There is no scientific evidence supporting the idea of a global flood in the past 10,000 years and much evidence demonstrating that no such event occurred. See the TalkOrigins archive for more details.
All of this has been presented to you before on this site. Pretending your ridiculous claims haven’t been refuted doesn’t seem to align with your bible’s instructions about bearing false witness.
When you have some contemporary evidence for the existence of an historical Jesus you can begin to talk about the credibility of the biblical stories.
This was one of the few time I said you had a legitimate point. But that doesn’t cure the faint young sun paradox and many other issues does it? We likely will never have all the facts we want to settle all the questions we have.
I stopped believing in evolution long ago, and after consider further evidence, I no longer think the claim of millions of years for the fossil record is empirically sustainable. Not just because of the faint young sun paradox, but the actual physical molecular “clocks” in the fossils themselves;
1. C-14
2. amino acid racemization state
3. DNAs
not to mention erosion rates, and why do we have stratigraphic layers like this, them millions of years explanation makes less and less mechanical sense the more one ponders it. A flood or water mixing sediments makes far more sense.
Absolutely nothing to lose, as long as your god is an idiot. If your god actually exists, what do you think that evil bastard will do to someone who tries to pull that kind of scam on it? Imagine having that happen to you forever.
Nothing personal against you (and I did support you in your criticisms of CSI)… as far as the Great Flood and the youth of the fossil record, I think it has a better than 1% chance of being the correct description of history. Agnostics like Richard Milton thinks there is recency in the fossil record too.
If one estimate of a hypothesis being right is close to zero, then one can approximate it as zero.
But in light of the Faint Young Sun paradox, even if the Earth is old, the fossil record cannot be old as a matter of principle.
What sort of odds will estimate that the fossil record is old? There is some circular reasoning in the estimate since fossils are used to data strata and strata are used to date fossils.
Now the actually rock component may deliver an old radiometric date, but as I said, it’s not logical to date a fossil on the age of the rocks anymore than it is logical to date the death of a dog by the 65 million year old rocks he’s buried in.
The fossils themselves have young radiometric C14 dates as well as two other chemical clocks (amino acids and DNA). Then you have the faint young sun paradox, the problem of stratagraphic layers, erosion rates. The fossil record has much better than 1% chance of being young, and just from the physical evidence alone with no theological considerations in play, I’d make a wager that the chances of the fossil record being young is better than 50%.
Additionally, in almost all fossil finds, there are marine fossils mixed in. I found it astonishing that marine creatures are used as index fossils to date strata where land creature fossils exist. Doesn’t any one find it odd that sea creatures are stuck in tree sap amber? How about the evolution of flowering plants in the cretaceous. Why should we have so many marine fossils mixed in with them? This is the index fossil used to date the cretaceous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_fossil#/media/File:SmallScaphites.jpg
In fact most of the index fossils listed are sea shells!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_fossil
Bullshit Sal. That are thousands of geologic formations that would be impossible to form in a one time Flood. We have meandering rivers deeply incised into sold basalt that couldn’t have formed when the basalt was still soft lava. We have angular unconformities like Siccar point which convinced geologists over 200 years ago the flood wasn’t real. We have exhumed river channels which a Flood can’t explain.
It’s already been tested and failed miserably Sal. There is no evidence in any species of a severe genetic bottleneck only 4500 years ago. If your Ark story was true every species should show such a bottleneck, but none do.
YECs have been ducking these points for decades Sal. You’ll cowardly duck them too.
A little more detail, please. What in the fossil record?
I’ll just snip out the change of subject, if you don’t mind.
I see Sal’s reverted to idiot YEC mode (if he ever left it). How many more hoary old PRATTs is he going to post today?
Are you claiming that dogs, cattle, and lions are each holobaramins?
stcordova,
Yes, we’ve been through all these. You were wrong then and you’ll be wrong this time too.
You concede I have a point on limestone and then just retreat to something else.
The faint young sun ‘paradox’ is no problem at all. The earth has long been heated from within. This was recognised in Kelvin’s day. Even if not enough to melt the oceans to the surface, early life was almost certainly not photosynthetic, and did not need an ocean’s worth of liquid water to survive. If life originated in ‘smokers’, these would be heated from within, not frozen from without. The direct evidence for ‘snowball earth’, furthermore, comes some 70% into the planet’s apparent existence, and depends on plate tectonics, with rates of continental drift far slower than permitted by a Creationist chronology unless you are prepared to allow earth-melting amounts of energy to be involved in shifting ’em. Yet another miracle, IOW.
Mr Gish wants his horse back. What your approach lacks is any attempt at consilience. You just throw together a grab-bag of supposed facts gleaned from Creationism-on-da-Web. It convinces you, and maybe you think you are saving souls if you can convince someone else, but it just looks perennially obtuse to me.
stcordova,
It would not be absolutely inconceivable for this to happen.
Sea levels, like investments, can go down as well as up. The strata are still delineated (if indeed you mean cyclothems). And we might wonder why there is any such thing as an index fossil, in a Flood-generated succession. It should be a simple matter to find one in another stratum. It should, indeed, be the rule than no organisms are confined to a stratum.
stcordova,
Domesticated organisms are subject to both strong directional selection and high inbreeding. This gives anomalously young ages.
I’m sure John could point to some methodological literature.
Love that.
Most of which are falsified immediately.
Just the cooling of masses of metamorphosed rock makes a recent flood impossible. Of course radiometric dating precludes it as well. Sal’s not interested in dealing with problems, however, but in appealing to authority plus the invocation of anything that might possibly be construed to make a flood and recent earth seem plausible (not that it does).
Which is good in a way, because it’s at least consistent with the special pleading and lack of regard for the patterns of evidence that we get from ID at large, including from Sal. I mean, why should only evolutionary theory be subject to bad thinking and illegitimate a priori commitments? Why not ruin all of knowledge for the sake of Sal’s desires for eternal life?
Glen Davidson
Another question for you Sal, that you will probably ignore, just like the rest:
Do you think that it’s necessary to be a YEC to win the wager? Will members of other christian denominations burn in hell for eternity?
I’ve only got this far so apologies if I’m repeating.
Sal,
I was prompted by your post to read the Genesis story. It’s laughably childish. Why on Earth do you need to take this stuff literally? Where are there significant references to the Noah tale in the New Testament, Sal?
Alan:
Here’s one. These are Jesus’s words, according to the author of Luke:
That’s why teh Flud is so important to people like Sal. If he admits that Genesis got it wrong, then he’s admitting that Jesus got it wrong, which blows the divinity claim out of the water.
On the other hand, if he tries to rescue Jesus’s divinity by arguing that the author of Luke misreported Jesus’s words, then he calls the accuracy of the Bible into question — including all of the divine crap.
Either of those is unacceptable to him, so Sal takes the third, idiotic option, which is to pretend that science is shot through with errors but that the author of Genesis actually got the story right.
Sal has to accept teh Flud story, no matter how childish and ridiculous, because otherwise the divinity of Jesus is called into question.
What about braver Christians who accept the findings of modern science? They (at least the ones who accept the divinity of Christ) have to explain why we should believe that Jesus was the son of God if the Bible, both Old Testament and New, cannot be trusted.
Nonbelievers (and Christians who don’t regard Jesus as divine) have the only sensible view of the bunch.
Regarding the Junk Bonds Ken Ham tried to sell:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-03/noah-s-ark-risks-collapse-without-bond-buyers-by-february
Keiths listed one, here is another from the Apostle Peter:
So even Christian Baptism is tied to Noah’s flood!
With respect to your question:
No problem old friend.
Jesus said Matt 18:3
But of course the story sounds superficially foolish. How do children or perhaps illiterate people or people struggling to describe real events sound after repeating what God taught them presumably through Adam who got the account from God.
I think the fossil record is young based on the evidence, and when I concluded that, it began to be possible to accept genesis more literally. As I said, I was on your side of the aisle once apon a time, I no longer find the fossil record is old.
Walter Brown, a West Point and MIT graduate and then professor at the Air Force Academy wrote a book that changed my mind as he made appeal directly to the physical evidence.
http://www.creationscience.com
The main unresolved difficulty, I outline here:
But considering the Christian God who pours out fire and brimstone and sends people to hell, of late I don’t think it’s so bad if I’m wrong after all, it would be much more merciful for most of humanity if the God of the Bible were not real and there were no judgement day. Noah’s flood was God’s testament He will pour out wrath on most of humanity, one day. The fossil record, to me, affirms Noah flood.
I wish I were wrong because of late I realized the Christian God will be unimaginably cruel to the majority of humanity that do not accept the grace offered through Jesus Christ. And even in this life Jesus prophesied:
Darwin’s bulldog Huxley believe humanity would have unlimited progress. I think the way I see the world going with the natural drive to keep overpopulating, the destruction of natural resources, the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, human nature will inevitably facilitate Jesus prophecy. How would poor carpenters son have so much insight on the outcome of the world? It would make sense if Jesus is who he said he was.
I pointed out something before:
Is there any reason Sal couldn’t consider these references to Noah to be literary rather than historical? Jesus could with similar purpose have said* that when the Balrog awoke in Moria it was pointless for the dwarves to run back for their gold. The point does not depend on the historicity of the example.
*Assuming that Jesus said anything, that Luke accurately reported it, and that Luke even wrote that document. But that’s another argument.