As a public interface for the Answer in Genesis apologetics ministry, Noah's Ark is very much an interactive spectacle that first and foremost convinces the public that Noah's Ark of the Bible truly did exist and truly could have been used to saved all of the land animals at the time of the Great Flood!
The group has absorbed considerable criticism from various religious groups and even misrepresentation from the state. Yet, today, around the world, news anchors have been reporting on the grand opening of Noah's Ark and the entertainment value such a spectacle can provide for the American public. Contrary to published reports, the venture did not cost taxpayers anything although it did mean employment for the state and additional revenues for the region. Of course, many science organizations were critical of the venture because of what they perceive as a very unscientific exhibit conflicting with their evolutionary view of ancient history.
There is a huge amount of hypocrisy with any criticism of the ark and even more ignorance about earth history and our origins. See if you agree.
To begin with, if a science centre, zoo, or Disney World had chosen to locate in Northern Kentucky, it would seem to me that no one would dare criticize it. It is the fine distinction that this particular theme park is based around a biblical event, the Great Flood, and a popular biblical icon surrounding that momentous event, an Ark whose construction and measurements were specifically laid out in the Old Testament scriptures by the God of traditional Judeo-Christianity.
But Noah's Ark also stands out as an important link to larger questions regarding (1) the historicity of the Bible, (2) an alternative geological concept of our earth's history, (3) the most recently recorded survival of humankind, and (4) the ultimate question of humankind's beginnings and a momentous close to an ancient world that is no longer widely acknowledged. You may feel secure in thinking modern science has all the answers. You would be very mistaken I think.
We would be much better served to feel confident about a true science which is supposed to be observable science. Our confidence in historic science should be very reserved for historic science becomes more inaccurate the further back we project it. Radiometric measurements do not agree with each other and must be suspiciously tweaked to appear to agree. The two major factors they assume is no parent element and a constant rate of decay, both of which have been disproved since the 1950's. For example, a sample of magma dome from Mount St. Helen's that erupted in 1980 was taken to a radiometric lab and dated at 350 thousand years old with some of its elements dating back to 2.8 million years! (The magma dome had formed in the aftermath of the eruption and settled in 1986.) Ice cores showing Greenland's ice shield to be 180 thousand years old have been observably contradicted by six American P38 airplanes crashed in 1942 and excavated in 1988 to be found under 270 feet of ice. Such a rate of accumulation would make Greenland's thickest glacier (est. 5000 feet) to have been absent only 1000 years ago! There are at least some 68 age-determinants that make the earth far younger than 6 billion years and some 14 of these indicated an age of only a few thousand. Helium diffusion rates from zircons containing radioisotopes produce, as a by-product, helium indicating an age for these oldest rocks as being only 6000 years +/- 2000 years. Even the universe bears the sign of youth: Of only some 225 super nova remnants and an explosion rate of one every 25-50 years, the number of super novas indicate a universe, too, that is only thousands of years old and not billions. The Faint Sun Paradox is another proof of a young universe. And there are many others. The recent discovery of soft T.Rex tissue is already making many doubt the vast ages and deep time treated as fact by mainstream science. Besides, the very origin of time has never been answered by science. Although Stephen Hawking admitted there had to have been a beginning, he only offered a meaningless tautology as a solution: That time perhaps originated with a singularity. And what did he mean by a singularity? Space-time. This is like saying that rain came from water falling down from the sky! The possibility that random chance produced our anthropic planet and our perfectly designed universe is even more unbelievable. The probabilities that such a sequence of developments occurring in just the right order by the millions (or billions? trillions?) would be unfathomably small.
The Ark also stands as a mute testimony that a true understanding of earth history is not a timeless gradual one but rather a history marked by dramatic geological upheavals, not the least of which, is a huge universal flood still not recognized today because of its immensity. A true in-depth look at such an ancient world would reveal a time of animal and human giantism with remarkable longevity because of a water vapour barrier surrounding the earth's atmosphere and delaying growth and aging. It even allows for a super continent to have existed only to have been separated into our continents because of deep "fountains of the deep" opening up the earth's mantle through massive tectonic shifts and thrusts. It would also explain the strange phenomenon of finding fossils on the top of the highest mountains inhabiting the earth today.
I am not convinced that Noah's Ark in Kentucky will ever sway the orthodoxy of science. Scientists are always the last to adopt the truth and the history of science itself has shown this. Look into the opposition faced by our fathers of science and try to imagine it no longer exists in our day and age, too.
I do not believe that the religious beliefs of the Answers in Genesis group is total agreement with the Bible, either. I notice that they are willing to accept the literal six days of creation without embracing its literal seventh-day creation--the Saturday Sabbath! They are, admittedly, an evangelical, baptist group that has only a few correct hobby horses they rock back and forth on, the primary truth being a young earth creation. Given their understanding though, why shouldn't they spend their money influencing a world today so devoid of values and skeptical of the Bible's inerrancy? Maybe they have alerted us to something greater than the Ark itself, that the Bible is true after all!
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