One of the loudest critics (newspaper-wise anyway) of the Noah’s Ark project near Williamstown, Ky., has been Lexington Herald-Leader columnist Tom Eblen, who recently wrote that he had an attack of curiosity, never mind that such a thing (ark, not curiosity) ever actually existed, and made his way via I-75 (aka as Death Alley) to see the figment of imagination of whoever wrote Genesis.
He described the ark (wooden but mythical, of course) and its dimensions, which were as close as possible to those described in Genesis. It’s roughly the size of the baby-aircraft-carrier (USS Palau) on whose flight-deck I pushed Corsairs around in the late 40s (not 1840s, for Harvard graduates who get the usual revisionist history). The carrier was 500 feet long, as is the ark, but the ark has more mass, I’m sure.
Eblen made a point of the $40 ticket price (steep for viewing something that never existed) and the $10 parking fee which probably had no time-limit. For a bit of perspective, I checked the best-seat ticket-price for the Taylor Swift concert in Austin, Texas, next October—$429 with fees of $17.70 (compared to parking?) and $1.47 for a total of $448.17.
The ark-proponents insist that the earth and everything connected to it, including mankind’s earliest existence, is about 6,000 years old and made by God in six days. Eblen wrote that the “scientists” (didn’t name any) claim the figure to be 4.5 billion years, making it terribly hard to explain away a differential of some 400,000,000,000 years. Other scientists say it’s about a billion years older but who’s counting anyway, especially since not a living human can comprehend even 6,000 years, much less billions.
Eblen is flustered because neither he nor the “scientists” can prove the ark-gang wrong. There are virtually no written records except the scriptures that go back roughly to 4,000 B.C. Some figures chiseled into rock have been found but no one knows when or what they mean. Caveat: I don’t accept the 6,000 figure, mainly because scripture also says that to God a day is as a thousand years. But I definitely accept the ark as a real boat in a real event, the flood. Anyhow, literally accepting the day-as-a-thousand-years figure, the time-line would call for 2,190,000 years instead of 6,000.
According to livescience, dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago, assuming they (the scientists, not the dinos) actually had a clue, which means by my accounting that they were gone long before the time of the ark, according to the ark-gang accounting, thus destroying the doubters’ favorite arguments concerning how to even catch them (the dinos, not the doubters) without being eaten, much less herd them onto the ark and keep them fed and peaceful.
Eblen claimed to be a “mainstream” (as opposed to “evangelical?”) Christian and so predictably led his essay into “evolution” (presumably of mankind), claiming that most “mainstream” Protestant denominations and the Catholics and Jews buy into that theory. Exponential nonsense! At least for me, a plain old Baptist.
I definitely haven’t evolved from a one-cell slime through the ape ages to the Now, and I laugh heartily every time some arrogant anthropologist insists he’s found the “missing link,” only to discover the tail still affixed or the knuckles not dragging the ground consistent with arm length. The evolutionists consider themselves the intellectual elite, and the evangelicals as poor, ignorant rubes. Eblen is welcome to his orangutan ancestors but I’ll take mine any day...straight from Adam through the ages.
I stand with the rubes and agree with them that man and woman were spontaneously created, no matter when. I believe they were formed whole in an instant on the sixth day, no matter its time, length and place. I doubt that dinosaurs (already extinct) ever saw the ark, but if they did, so what!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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