You can read the Bible. You can learn about science. You can live in a world inundated with images. Nothing can prepare you for your first glimpse of the Ark.
There it stands, a colossal hull of wooden planks hulking over trees and fields. The sight falls like an imposition. Yes, you think, that’s a big ship. Yes, you are supposed to think, that’s just how the most extraordinary ship must really have looked as it settled onto a cleansed earth under a spreading rainbow. From your seat inside the shuttle bus which ferries you in from the parking lot you are supposed to marvel at God’s word made visible at a theme park in northern Kentucky.
The Ark is the largest free-standing timber-frame structure in the world. Amish craftsmen pounded together 3.3 million board feet of fir, spruce, and pine (no one is quite sure what kind of wood is meant by the Hebrew word “gopher ”). The length of the Ark is 510 feet, the breadth of it 85 feet, and the height of it 51 feet. Which is to say, it’s half the length of the Titanic, 200 feet longer than the Statue of Liberty laid on its side. Two and a half Ark-lengths would exceed the height of the Empire State Building and easily get stuck in the Suez Canal.
The Ark’s creators proudly cite such figures—but they hasten to add that this is only a replica. A life-sized imitation of the historical Ark, which the patriarch Noah built at Divine command to shelter his family and the fauna of the earth from an all-consuming Flood sent by God to punish sinful mankind 4,370 years ago. This, the builders insist, is a definitive fact. Also, did you know that there were dinosaurs on the Ark? That the Ice Age and present-day global warming are long-term results of the Flood?
Ark Encounter—an evangelical theme park which aspires to be taken seriously as a science museum—is operated by Answers in Genesis, a private fundamentalist Christian apologetics group. In the view of its president, Ken Ham, AiG’s stated mission of “helping Christians defend their faith” entails meeting the evidence-based claims of the “secular worldview” head-on. The Bible, he insists, is not a book of stories, but an accurate historical record. The claims of mainstream science must be refuted point by point, ingeniously reinterpreted, or undermined by radical skepticism. Alternative claims based on the literal truth of the Bible must be put forward and augmented by elaborate constructions—like the Ark. The result is undeniably impressive: an exciting, if somewhat unwieldy, Young Earth creationist account of world history.
In 2007, AiG opened its Creation Museum, which presents the past and future of the universe in terms of “7 C’s”: Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, and Consummation. But the goal was always to build the Ark—to justify faith by this most extravagant of works. Ham, a self-appointed latter-day Noah, wants to prove to the world that the other Ark really could have existed—which is supposed to convince us that it did exist. It’s hard to imagine a gigantic curiosity persuading many nonbelievers. Still less does it seem necessary for preaching to the choir; unlike the doubting apostle Thomas, the truly faithful shouldn’t need to poke into miracles with impertinent fingers.
But conservative donors jumped. The 
49.95 admission ticket (kids ages 5-10 get in for 
24.95). On the second deck, two side attractions amplify the dissonances inherent in this family attraction. “Kids’ Spooky Animal Encounters” has fun little darkened tunnels to duck into, where colored lights and funny animations explore the question, “What do animals do when Noah’s family is sleeping?” The “Fairy Tale Ark” room, on the other hand, displays a collection of illustrated Biblical children’s books in order to condemn their whimsical style. “Warning,” reads a sign, “cute Arks are dangerous. They distort God’s Word and ultimately malign His character.”
But how do you reach the younger generations, said to be fleeing from the church in droves? There’s a petting zoo on the grounds, which, as an unaccompanied grown man, I somewhat regretfully skipped. But you can’t let things get too fun, or impressionable minds might find in the Bible a wonderful story and not a factual account. As I toured Ark Encounter, I tried to see the whole thing through the eyes of my own vanished life as an imaginative kid. One little boy I noticed sat alone in the darkened stern of the first deck, looking bored and somewhat oppressed by the immensity of the planks and wooden columns around him, as his mother hovered eagerly over scale models nearby and boned up on Baranminological data from the huge wall placards. Who, in the end, is AiG really trying to convince?
When, at last, the astonishment at the whole affair wears off—can you believe someone went to all this trouble?—a kind of mental exhaustion sets in. All the mythic wonder has been leached from the story of Noah’s Ark, leaving behind an appalling barrenness. Seeing has corrupted belief. Instead of imagining restless animals and frightened people crouched in a storm-tossed boat, we ponder the timetable for throwing grain to the cattle and salted meat to the tyrannosaurs. Ark Encounter’s tagline reads, “It’s bigger than imagination.” Actually, it’s much smaller, like the difference between reading the Iliad or Aeneid and seeing the movie Troy . Onscreen, no city gates, no wooden horse, can ever live up to what we imagine; handsome and athletic though Brad Pitt may be, he is no Achilles.
Ken Ham and his fundamentalists have let the empirical worldview they claim to despise transform the essence of their faith from within. When did they miss the boat? “Creationists and evolutionists study the same evidence,” insists a placard in the science section on the third deck. “We examine the same rocks, the same fossils, the same world.…Our conclusions are strongly influenced by our worldviews.” Yes, but a worldview that even admits of “evidence” is already playing by empiricist rules, even if it does so in what any self-respecting scientist would term “bad faith.”
The mindset behind Ark Encounter belongs to the transitional stage from myth to empiricism, as when Newton’s friend and student William Whiston proposed that the earth’s passage through the watery tail of a comet had been God’s instrument for raining Floodwaters down throughout the atmosphere for 40 days straight. Before the 17th century, would anyone have even asked about the mechanism for the Flood, much less questioned its historical accuracy? But, then, what was the meaning of “history” to illiterate masses? Even the few who could read the Bible, instead of hearing it from the pulpit, still thought about their world in mythic terms. If the image of Noah’s poor nameless wife shoveling an unthinkable volume of shit for a year even occurred to them, it probably felt subversive or even blasphemous.
Still, even since late antiquity a very few scholars have worried themselves over these sorts of details. On the subject of animal feces, the Talmud records the oral teaching that the entire first deck was dedicated to storing manure. I half wished that Ark Encounter had gone with this interpretation, which suggests a more thoroughgoing familiarity with animal husbandry than I suspect Ken Ham has acquired. A few centuries later, Saint Augustine, citizen of a crumbling empire, wondered how the animals released from the Ark could have gone on to populate remote islands. His conclusion is revealing: God made new animals spring from the earth, while the animals on the Ark served merely as an allegory, “typifying the various nations, thus presenting a symbol of the Church.” Even the most literal ancient minds had quick recourse to mythic explanations.
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If I didn’t find him both repulsive and dangerous, I might feel sorry for Ken Ham. He’s set himself an impossible task—though of course, AiG takes in $12 million in profits during a typical year. On this humbler scale, Ham somewhat resembles another misinformation mogul from Down Under, Rupert Murdoch. You can make a lot of money selling the American Right spectacles it didn’t even realize it wanted.
Still, it’s impossible to doubt Ham’s sincerity, especially when he becomes petulant. Clearly he feels he’s been dealt an unfair hand. “When Peter and Paul were preaching, do you think they got asked questions about carbon dating?” he exclaims. “Do you think Martin Luther in the 16th century was asked questions about whether dinosaurs were on the Ark?” Stiff-necked people have been a nuisance ever since Moses struggled to corral the Israelites across the desert, but these days they can bring in so much flummoxing data.
It is a strange feature of our times that everyone, regardless of political affiliation, feels embattled. As liberals and leftists confront the nightmare of post-Roe America and the specter of worse to come, Ark Encounter’s visitors are paying for a different underdog fantasy when they come to playact the Genesis story: whether by earthly law or divine, the culture of “moral relativism” will reap the whirlwind, and soon. “The pre-Flood world was exceedingly wicked and deserved to be judged,” reads a placard on the second deck of Ark Encounter. “Does our sin filled-world deserve any less?” Accelerationist at heart, evangelical America eagerly awaits the Rapture, but its leaders seem happy to erode democracy and collect dividends until the end—which may well come by floodwaters yet again, despite God’s promises in Genesis 9:11.
It strikes me as curious that these people see themselves as pure and devout, their worldview reverent toward creation. It seems to me that a far greater reverence could be theirs if they would only look at it. How many scientists, pondering the enormity of cosmic expansion or the depth of the geologic timescale, feel indescribable awe? How many of us feel it, too, when trying to understand what they have discovered? To comprehend, even imperfectly, may be its own redemption. Who, then, are the true believers? The evolution of manifold lifeforms across fathomless spans of time seems to me a far more stupendous miracle than 6,000 years and a story about a boat, no matter how beautifully told. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.
Or not. “Noah was pretty smart, wasn’t he, boys?” I overheard a dad say to his young sons as I fled from the Ark, worn out. And so I can’t deny I learned something among our fellow citizens, the thousands who throng to Ark Encounter every day, standing around me staring at dinosaurs in cages and soberly nodding, “yes, that happened.” How much less difficult to believe as well that the election was stolen, that pedophiles run the government, or that vaccines do all manner of things other than protect against disease. Strangely, Ark Encounter sheds some light on the sickness in our nation’s soul. But don’t take my word for it—you have to see it. You won’t believe it. ~
